So back in 2009 after being reminded of the story, I sat down one night and figured out how I could manage to do this same lesson with a larger cohort of students (150+) using technology to manage it, rather than Sister Mrolsas’s 20 or so students using scissors, paste and long-hand writing. And I solved it. Tried it in 2010 at Christmas season and the students loved it. Now in year 3. Here’s how:
(n.b. I use Apple and Mac applications on Mac machines, but I’ll write the directions in Windows Office Hua as that seems to be what many of you use and almost all of your students use. The Mac apps I use, I convert the stuff to Windows Office for use by the unwashed.)
PRINT THE BELOW PART OUT IF YOU WISH YO USE THIS LESSON:
1.Introduce the project and tell the original story.
2.Prepare an XLS spreadsheet (if you don’t already have a spreadsheet for each class, why not?) It should be a simple spreadsheet with headers for only Family Name, Given Name, English Name, and Comment. That last field should be very wide.
3. Name the spreadsheet something identifiable for the class, if you have more than one class, like W5Project.XLS (for your Wednesday 5th period class). This will be the template for the students to write their comments on.
4.Have the students download this template, and tell them to type in their comment about each class member in the Comment field, then have them add their name to the file name, and send it back to you. (Eg. W5Project-Mary.XLS) This way, you can keep track of students’ submissions.
5.After you’ve received all of the students XLS files for the class, open up the original template as a master document, then one-by-one open each of the submitted XLS files. Cut-and-Paste their whole submission into the Master document. This will take some time, but not nearly as much time as physically cutting with scissors and pasting bits of paper.
6.When you’ve finished the “computer” cutting and pasting, then go back to the master document and SORT the document by Family Name and then Given Name. (If you don’t know how to do this, save the Master document first with a different name before you try this.)
7. If you’ve followed this so far, your Master XLS file should be listed with all the nice comments your students made about each of their classmates in groups by name.
8. From there, you should be able to highlight just each persons’ name and have your printer only print out the comments for that person resulting in one page of nice comments for each person in your class.
Cut-and-Paste 2012 style.
9. Once all the XLS files are submitted, it takes me about 2 hours per class to consolidate all of them into one, sort (takes about 2 seconds), highlight and print out one page for each student.
10. I print this out on the inside of a Christmas Card template that I use, so each student gets a generic Old34 Christmas Card with a full print out of all the nice things their classmates had to say about them.
Like in the original story (above), many of my students have been moved by their classmates’ comments.
This lesson rocks, and there’s still enough time to get it done by Christmas if you’ree so inclined.