In Episode 50 of the Google Teacher Tribe Podcast, Bailee Sandsmark, a 6th-grade middle school PE teacher, asked a Google Sheets question that got my gears turning. All that gear turning inspired a new #EduGIF from me. First, let’s look at her question:
I’d like to send out a Sheets template to all 250 of my students for them to individually track their fitness testing data, but then I would like to have an efficient way for them to share that info with me so that I can see all of my students’ data in one sheet. Having to access 250 different sheets makes my head spin…
While Matt & Kasey had a handful of good ideas of their own, I had another one that I wanted to share. It came from a thought that Matt shared: it’d be nice to give each student a tab in one spreadsheet, but then each student could edit the others’ tabs. That’s where “tab-level permissions” comes into play. If you click on the tabs at the bottom of your Google Sheet, there’s a Protect Sheet option. It’s also accessible from under Tools. As you’ll see in the Animated GIF below, you can use this to give tab-level edit rights to specific students.
Before we get the GIF, a few notes:
- If each tab will be identical, you can duplicate the tabs.
- If you’d like to create a tab for each of your students, you can use Alice Keeler’s Template Tab add-on.
- You can also use this to give or limit edit access for just specific cells – I do this sometimes to make sure no one messes up formulas that I have running.
- In Bailee’s, situation, she’ll still have the issue that each student can see their classmate’s information (even though they can’t edit it). To prevent this, you could give them code names or numbers.
- The tabs that we’re referring to are technically called sheets, but I think that’s super confusing that the individual parts of Google Sheets are Sheets. What!?
And finally, the GIF:
