How to Send Students Their Speech Critique Sheets by Email
Instructions for Emailing Individual Grade Sheets to Students
Here’s how it works: you need to create a separate workbook for each worksheet since Excel doesn’t let you mail individual worksheets from a workbook (you can only email an entire workbook, and that’s obviously a bad idea). Here’s how you do it.
Open up the speech worksheet you want to email to a particular student (say, Speech Three, student 12).
On the top toolbar, click on “Edit>Move or Copy Sheet”. This will open up a new dialog box.
VERY IMPORTANT--check the box at the bottom of the box that says “Create a copy”!
Now click on the drop-down menu underneath “To book” at the top of the dialog box and select “(new book)”.
Click OK.
Now you should have a separate workbook with a copy of just that one worksheet. (You should see just the tab (say, “12”) at the bottom of the worksheet and no other tabs.) You’ll also notice the color background of the worksheet has changed to an olive color—that’s because I used a custom palette for SpeechGrader that doesn’t carry over to new workbooks. (There are ways to change the color, but I’m assuming that won’t be a high priority to you. If you’d like to know, however, email me and I’ll be glad to tell you.)
When you close out of the new workbook, it will ask you to save it (the default is “Book1”). I recommend saving it using the student’s name so you avoid any confusion.
Now you’re ready to email the new workbook you’ve created. To do this,
Open (double-click) the workbook you just saved (if it’s not open already).
You will be asked to “Update” or “Don’t Update.” Choose “Don’t Update”. (Choosing “Update” will give you a dialog box that says it can’t find any of the program links. In the event you accidentally chose that, just then click “Continue”.)
Make sure it’s the one you want and that it has an olive-colored background.
Now click on “File” on the top menu and then “Send to”.
You should see a variety of options on how to send your olive-colored new worksheet page. I recommend sending it as an attachment. (Note: This usually will open up Microsoft Outlook or Express and use the email address you normally use there.)
In your message, you may want to tell your recipient to choose “Don’t update” when they open it, or they will get the same error messages.
Enter the email address of the recipient and click “Send”.
Note: When the student opens the file, they must have Microsoft Excel to read their file! If they don’t have it, you can direct them to the Microsoft site for a free Excel viewer (access it here).
Note 2: Students will receive everything you put on the page, including any side notes you may have taken on the right of the grading criteria that are not normally printed.
Upon receiving and opening the workbook, students can manipulate their criterion grades (i.e., change numbers and letter grades for individual criteria), but this shouldn’t pose any problems since they can’t change their category and final grades. (Therefore, they can’t come to you and say, “This says I have an ‘A’—what do you mean I have a ‘C’”?) Also, none of the links on the page will work since they don’t have the master gradebook program.
One final note is to check with your school about privacy policies. At my school, for example, emailing students their grades is not allowed, but posting them via a password-protected system is. A solution to this may be to password-protect the workbook you’re sending to the student with a student-generated password (see p. 65 in the User Manual for how to password protect a workbook).
