WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com... [2]

You have, as they say, got to have a system. And I hadn’t got one to check homework completion. Pupils began to realise this and took advantage - that is until I came up with the Homework Checker!

This is a very useful tool if you’ve got a projector/interactive whiteboard. Pupils can see at a glance that you’re keeping track of what they’ve done and which pieces of homework they need to catch up on. Basically, green means done and in on time, red means not handed in yet (or submitted incomplete), and yellow means completed but handed in late. Pupils names go down the left-hand side of the spreadsheet and the title of the homework goes along the top. You enter y if it’s been done, n if it hasn’t and l if it’s late. This automatically changes the cell colour to green, red or yellow once you move away from that cell. See below for a step-by-step guide on how to set one of these up for yourself!

(If you want to skip the instructions below and try out a pre-formatted example, [3] click here)

1. Set up a basic spreadsheet with the names of the pupils in the class down the side. Put each homework as it comes in the columns with the title at the top (hint: you can rotate the text direction by going to Format/Cells/Alignment). After selecting which cells you want to apply the conditional formatting to, you need to go to Format/Conditional Formatting (pictured)

2. Conditional Formatting in Excel is a simple ‘If, Then’ logic operation with a limit of 3 operators. (hint: click ‘Add’ to get more operators) You want to tell Excel to replace text with a colour. Change it so that it looks like it looks like the picture below (y=homework done, n=homework not completed yet, l=handed in late). You can change the colours and/or letters you use, but make sure you change the cell background colour and the font colour so that you don’t get a black y on a green background, for example…

3. Now, when you enter y, n or l into your spreadsheet and move the cursor you should find that the cell turns the appropriate colour!

4. In the picture below a y was entered in the top cell, an n in the second and an l in the third. Once a pupil has completed a homework you can change it from red to yellow by simply entering an l on top of the red cell.

5. Below is the grid from an actual class. If a pupil is absent I leave the cell white (expecting that they will hand it in next lesson). If they were absent when it was set, I enter abs.

Once you get into a routine this can be a really effective way of getting pupils to hand their homework in regularly, especially if followed up with memos to form tutors/calls to parents/detentions, etc. I tend to have this on my laptop and on the projector at the same time and ask pupils if they have their homework once they have started the main activity. They know I’m going to check so there’s no point in lying, and they also know that 3 reds (anywhere on ‘their row’) = an after-school detention!

Popularity: 14% [[4] ?]