Where have you gone, fresh springtime brain of my youth?
Maybe the trouble is that I started today with DocAppender. Or maybe it's that I tried to run AutoCrat on a form that didn't need AutoCratting. Or possibly it's that I've been travelling, juggling the kids and family, with no immediate classroom-payoffs in sight. But I must disclose: I took a look at the elaborate AutoCrat script I ran months ago, and my weary brain wondered, "Wow. How did I do that?"
So I think it's best to preface my reviews by saying that I do embrace the increasingly crowded world of add-ons. But boy does it help to be looking at them with a fresh and focused head on your shoulders. Here's my review:
- RowCall: Thumbs up! Where was this add-on when I was organizing field trips this year? I am not exaggerating- it could have saved me hours worth of work. Row call takes a spreadsheet and, with a few clicks, makes additional page tabs showing the breakdown as you request it. I organized our 8th grade field trip bus lists by third period teacher, and spent valuable prep time duplicating my list of students over and over, and filtering each duplicate with a different teacher's name. The real fun started when certain kids changed classes at the last minute- then I had to update the master sheet, their old teacher's list, and their new teacher's list. RowCall automatically updates the filtered pages, so that additional work wouldn't have been necessary. I also tried running this add-on with a class roster form; it easily broke up my students by period. Pros: simplicity, speed. Cons: the additional pages reveal data, not formatting (if your cell on your original sheet is pink, it will be white on the extra page).
- AutoCrat: Thumbs up! There is so much Autocrat can do; it is the marriage of forms and docs. One way I used it this year was to as an essay frame. I started sentences or asked questions, and students filled in the blanks. I ran an AutoCrat script that emailed their answers back to them in an editable doc. One accidental victory in that situation is that, since I was the owner of the doc, nothing ever had to be turned in- I already had all students' work saved in my Drive. Everybody wins. However, I thought I'd revisit AutoCrat today with my class roster, and... weary brain lost the battle. Maybe that's because a class roster is already so simple, there's not much need for forcing an AutoCrat into it. Pros: emailing respondents with personalized text, creating custom folder & doc names for storage, extremely versatile. Cons: you almost need to learn a new language to figure this out; it took me a few tries.
- Doc To Form: Thumbs sideways. I used this earlier this year, after a colleague asked me to convert her doc quiz to a form quiz. This add-on saved time because it allowed me to copy and paste text into my form, rather than having to retype it. However, the process wasn't seamless. First, you have to copy and paste every question, and every answer option; you can't copy and paste them all together. Second, you can't save your work and come back to it- even though copying text line-by-line takes a while. Third, after ten questions, you have to pay for the add-on... I wish I had known that from the beginning, so I didn't have to pay, reload, and start all over again. Pros: better than retyping a doc word-by-word. Cons: takes time, doesn't save, no prior warning that you'll need to pay for more than ten questions.
- DocAppender: Thumbs down. Maybe it's that weary brain I mentioned, but I could not get this to work. I thought it might be a quick way to take my class roster and put it into an easy-on-the-eyes doc table, but no such luck. My first mistake was trying to use it as an add-on to my form results (a spreadsheet); it doesn't exist in this realm. You've got to use it as an add-on while you're still in forms. The add-on icon looks like a puzzle piece. Which makes since, I guess: trying to work with this one just left me puzzled. Pros: good idea. Cons: I couldn't figure it out.