Classroom & Teaching Tools

What the classroom tools cover

This category covers the work around teaching rather than the teaching itself. The Lesson Plan Maker and the Rubric Maker turn a rough outline into a sheet a colleague or a marker can follow. The Report Card & Progress Report Maker and the Permission Slip & Consent Form Maker handle documents that must look official and say the same thing for every child.

Others belong in the lesson itself. The Classroom Timer sits on the board during a task. The Group & Team Maker splits a class without an argument about who picks. The Seating Chart Maker and the Exit Ticket Maker cover the two ends of a session. The rest make practice material: Spelling Test Generator, Times Tables Trainer, Handwriting Practice Sheets, Number Line Maker, Reading Log Maker and Reward Chart Maker.

Why the browser matters here

Nearly everything here needs real pupil names. A seating chart is useless without the register, and a group maker has to know who is in the class. That raises a question most tools never raise: whether it is acceptable to type thirty children's names into a website. Here the answer is simple. The tools run inside your own browser, nothing is sent anywhere, and an automated check blocks any release in which a tool tries to reach the network.

One useful side effect is that a page keeps working with the network off. School wi-fi is often the least reliable thing in the room, and a timer that stalls mid-task is worse than no timer. The trade-off is that nothing follows you about. There is no account, so a chart made on the staffroom computer is not waiting on the one in your classroom. Save or print what you want to keep, at the time you make it.

Choosing, and one thing to get right

Split the list in two before you scroll it. Some tools produce something you take away: a plan, a rubric, a slip, a worksheet. Others are meant to be on screen while you teach, like the timer and the group maker. Deciding which of the two you need turns twenty-three options into about four.

The class list is where mistakes start. Names get typed in a hurry, and one wrong spelling then repeats on every chart, slip and sheet built from it. Read it back once before you generate anything. Check a sheet on paper too, before running off thirty copies; margins and type size look different there. And remember that next term starts from a blank page unless you kept a copy.

Getting a sheet from the screen to the photocopier

Nothing here writes a PDF file. A worksheet is built as a web page, and the Answer Sheet Maker draws its page as SVG. Either way the sheet is handed to your browser's own print dialogue. Save as PDF is a printer you pick in that box, not a step the tool does for you. The good side of that is an honest preview: what is on screen and what comes off the printer are the same layout.

Paper size is set by the sheet rather than asked about. When it prints, the Cloze Worksheet Maker asks for A4 with 16 mm margins. The Class Marks & Grades Sheet and the Class Job Rota Maker ask for A4 with 12 mm. The Attendance Register Maker asks for A4 landscape with 10 mm, because a term of date columns will not fit down a portrait page. Sheets that set no rule of their own fall back to the site rule: A4, 14 mm top and bottom, 15 mm at the sides. The Answer Sheet Maker is the one that offers a choice of A4, US Letter or A5. Letter is 215.9 mm by 279.4 mm, so it is a little wider than A4 and nearly 18 mm shorter. If that is what your printer holds, look at the preview before you run the class set.

One sheet must not be scaled at all. The bubble answer sheet is drawn in real millimetres with the page margin set to zero. A marking key only saves time if it sits over every paper in the pile in the same place. So print it at 100 per cent rather than fit to page, then put a ruler on the 100 mm bar at the foot of the sheet. If the bar comes out short, the printer shrank the page and the key will not line up. The four solid corner squares are there for the same check by eye.

The list of file types is short on purpose. Most tools will save a plain text copy of what you made. Three of them write CSV: the marks sheet, the report cards, and the returns list from the permission slips. The Lesson Plan Maker saves a .json file it can open again later, and the Answer Sheet Maker can save its first page as .svg. Nothing here reads or writes .docx or .xlsx.

Keep-apart rules, and why nothing here rerolls the dice

Two tools take a class list plus the pairs who must not end up together: the Group & Team Maker and the Seating Chart Maker. Neither of them shuffles and hopes. With half a dozen keep-apart pairs a random deal almost never meets them all, and a teacher standing in front of a class cannot keep pressing the button. So both deal the names out once and then mend the result. Find a pair that has landed together, swap one of them with somebody else, and keep the swap only if the number of clashes drops. The groups tool gives that up to 60 passes, the seating chart up to 80. Whatever it could not place is named on screen, so you are never handed a chart that quietly breaks a rule you set.

The two differ in what together means. For groups it is simple: the same group. On a seating chart it is geometry, and each layout sets its own rule. In rows, neighbours sit side by side or straight in front and behind, never on the diagonal, because you do not chat over your shoulder. At a cluster of tables everyone on the table counts. In a U-shape the two ends are next to each other in the seat list but metres apart in the room, so seat number is not adjacency and the tool does not treat it as one. Children you mark as needing the front are seated first and pinned, and no later swap can move them out.

Group sizes are levelled as the names go out. Twenty-three children into four groups comes out 6, 6, 6 and 5, not 8, 5, 5 and 5, because the remainder is spread one per group.

Both tools have a seed box. Type a word into it and the same class list gives the same answer every time, so this morning's chart can be printed again this afternoon. Leave it empty and every press gives something new. The Quiz Maker uses a seed for a different end. Its versions are numbered from it, so version B today and version B next week, for the child who was away, are the same paper. The letters on its answer key are worked out after the shuffle and never carried over from before it. Writing the key first and then reordering the options is how you end up with a tidy quiz and a key that marks every paper wrong.

Names typed into these tools stay in the browser you typed them into. Five of them keep a working copy there so you can come back to it: the register marks, the report card drafts, the lesson plan, the fields on the permission form, and the reading fluency history. Each keeps its own copy under its own key, so there is no shared class list. Names pasted into the seating chart do not turn up in the register. Clearing site data clears the lot, and another computer never had it. If a plan has to travel, save the .json file and take that with you.

The sums, and where these tools refuse to guess

Every tool here that hands you a number also says which rule produced it. Schools do not agree on these rules, and a figure without its rule is hard to defend when a parent asks.

The Reading Fluency Recorder works out words correct per minute: words attempted, less errors, divided by the seconds the child actually took, times 60. That divisor is the whole point. A child who reads a 78-word passage in 41 seconds has read at 114 words a minute, not 78. Fixing the divisor at 60 seconds punishes the readers who are doing best, and it is the usual slip in a record kept by hand. The printed sheet lists what was counted as an error, and there is a switch for schools that count a self-correction.

The Attendance Register Maker divides sessions present by sessions that counted. A session marked # because the school was shut to that group is left out of the divisor, and so is a session nobody has marked yet. Take ten days at one session a day, with a pupil present on eight, ill on one and the tenth closed. That is 8 over 9, so 88.9 per cent. Dividing by ten gives 80 and invents an absence that never happened; dividing by the eight marked gives 100.

The Class Marks & Grades Sheet divides each mark by its own maximum before it applies the weight, so a paper out of 50 and a paper out of 100 can be added up fairly. The example it opens with can be checked on paper: 45 out of 50 at weight 40, with 72 out of 100 at weight 60, gives 79.2 per cent. A blank is not a nought. A dash, or the word abs, is read as a paper not sat; its weight is shared over the papers the pupil did sit, and the row is flagged so you can see it happened. Scoring blanks as zero is offered, but you have to turn it on.

Two more work the same way. Rubric weights are normalised first, so 3, 2, 1 and 50, 33, 17 describe the same rubric; the odd point left over by rounding goes to the heaviest criterion, so the column still adds to the total you set. And in the Bell Schedule Builder and the Lesson Plan Maker every time is held as minutes past midnight and only becomes 10:35 on the way to the screen. Adding 50 minutes to the text 09:55 is how a timetable comes to print a period starting at 10:105.

Refusing to guess is the other half of the job. The Telling the Time Worksheets gear the hour hand: at 3:45 it stands 112.5 degrees round from the top, three quarters of the way from the 3 to the 4, not parked on the 3. But an analogue face cannot tell morning from afternoon, so asking for 24-hour answers gives a sheet of afternoon and evening times only, and the sheet says as much. The Cloze Worksheet Maker takes its gaps from a built-in list of small words: articles, prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions and the helping verbs. Those classes are closed, so they can simply be listed. It does no grammar analysis and does not pretend to, because telling a noun from a verb needs the sentence around the word.

A few caps are worth knowing before you paste a year group in place of a class. The Attendance Register Maker holds 300 names across 200 date columns. The Class Marks & Grades Sheet holds 400 pupils over 12 weighted components. The Report Card & Progress Report Maker holds 240 pupils and 24 subjects, and the Permission Slip & Consent Form Maker holds 120.