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Annotated Seating Plans in Google Sheets

Annotated seating plans have been something we have been working on for a while and I've just about got there in terms of functionality. This has been a combined effort between several members of staff and myself, with getting the data off SIMS (our MIS) in a sensible format being the most challenging aspect.

It looks like:


The system basically does the following:
  • User makes a copy of a central sheet.
  • Selects a class
  • Data auto populates and updates periodically
  • User arranges students in a grid

So as little end user (teacher) setup as possible required. Broadly speaking this now works. The issues that do arise come from the inability of SIMS to extract all the data we require in one report. We use 8 reports in total with then need merging into one central data sheet. The following two videos look at the inner workings of the seating plan sheet and the backend datasheet.




So it's not perfect, but for most classes it works fine now. Updating the back end sheet I've now got down to about 30-40 minutes.  







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