Illuminate's New Lightning Grader

As some of you may have noticed, Illuminate has updated the gradecam function this year. For those of you who were happy scanning the bubble sheets in with your computer's camera, there won't be much of a change, but for those of you wanted a faster way, you're in for some good news - you can scan all of the sheets into the copy machine and upload the entire file for Illuminate to input.

In addition to the different way to input the tests, there are also some changes made in types of questions that you can put on the bubble sheet. Along with multiple choice and true/false questions, you can also print lines for short answer and essay questions and they will be visible when you look at the answer sheets in Illuminate.

Check out the CISD's overview video here. A quick and easy reference guide is also available.

Update for Google Drive

If you use Google Drive a lot in your work, you may have noticed a recent addition - Team Drives.

In the past, If I know that I'm going to be sharing a lot of materials with a certain group of people, say my PLC, I would create a folder and share it with all of the members of the team; doing this means that any materials that are saved to that folder will be automatically shared with the people who have rights to the folder. The one problem with this was that if a team member left for some reason, their documents left too. Team Drives fixes this issue, when a team uses Team Drives, all documentation stays with the drive even if a member leaves.

Scanning Bubble Sheets into Illuminate

It's been awhile since I've talked about Illuminate, so I thought I'd share what many of you might find a time-saving tip. For those of you who are not using the hybrid online assessment where students log into the student portal, and see the test and the question bubbles side-by-side, but are having students fill out the bubble sheet printed on paper, you can actually take your stack of bubble sheets to one of the copy machines and scan the sheets that way.

Scanning Documents into the Copy Machine

Step 1: Place the stack of bubble sheets in the copy tray at the top as you would for making general copies.

Step 2: On the copy machine, push the Scanner button in the lower left-hand corner.

Copying the Contents of a Cell to the Bottom of the Column

I find it really annoying when I'm working in a large spreadsheet and have to copy a formula that I just entered all of the way down to the bottom of the column. Mind you, this isn't much of a problem if the spreadsheet only goes down to the bottom of the screen, but I often work with spreadsheets that contain information on students in multiple buildings; this can mean that I'm dealing with thousands of rows of information. Having to click on the "auto fill" cursor (you know, the little plus sign in the lower right hand of the cell) and drag down through thousands of rows can be a real pain...if only there were an easier way.

How To Join Multiple Cells In A Spreadsheet.

In my last post, I showed you how to take information from one cell and split it into two different cells. In this post, I'm going to show you how to take multiple cells and combine their data into one cell.

There are a couple of ways to merge the cells, but they are both based on the concatenate feature. When you concatenating things, you are linking, or joining them together. In the example that we'll be looking at today, we're going to be taking lists of student first and last names that we have in different cells and putting them together in a different cell.