IA Notion How-To
The purpose of this template is to make an Instructional Aide’s daily duties more efficient and convenient. Please follow these steps carefully, and don’t be afraid to reach out if you have questions or are having issues. Pictures will be provided!
Table of Contents
Why Notion?
Access to the Template
Home Pages Overview
Master Pages
Responsibilities
Students
Tag Key
Class Pages
Tutorial
Adding Students
Adding Students (Extra)
Adding Assignments
Adding Assignments (Extra)
Adding Tests and Quizzes
Summary
Why Notion?
Notion is a free online note-taking system with lots of customizable and easy-to-understand features. I recommend looking at a basic tutorial of how Notion works, as for our purposes, we will not need anything more than the base features.
The screenshots I provide are in dark mode, which can be changed in the settings, but everything inside the pictures will be the same whether in light or dark mode.
Notion is an always-updating application that is always changing for the better. The way your Notion pages look might be slightly different, but the general idea is the same.
Access to the Template
To use the template, you first need access to it. Go to Notion.so and create a free account using your school email. Then, use the link below and click the blue button at the top right that says, “Start with this Template.”
Home Pages
This is your home page. The whole page is to the left, which I rarely look at, and to the right is the sidebar view of the same page. This appears when you open the side menu and click the down arrow when you hover over the apple next to “Perry Schools Home Page.” This lets you quickly move from class to class.
You might have seen this page appear under your home page. This is where the master pages are that are linked inside each class.
Master Pages
In your Work Resource Page, you will find three master pages; Responsibilities, Students, and Tag Key. Each page is linked in every class and is used for a general overview of assignments, students, and their tags. Here we will get a detailed look into what each page contains and how to use them.
Responsibilities Master Page
First, our “Responsibilities” master page. This is where you may organize assignments that your teachers issue. This table is automatically set to look at all assignments, but you may look at specific classes by clicking on their respective tabs. The purpose of this master page is to view assignments on the respective classes’ main pages. For example, when you click to look at period 1’s main page, you will see its unique view of this very table, but only focusing on period 1’s assignments as shown below.
Later we will learn how to add our assignments and how they relate to the master page.
Students Master Page
Next, our “Students” master page. This will be the main place to find all your students and see how they are doing. This page is automatically set to look at all of your students, but you may look at each class’s specific students, and the tabs can be sorted by general grade. Every class has their view of this page as the first thing you see. For example, when opening our “Period 1” page, we will see this view front and center as shown below. This view is strictly for students in your period 1 class, but can also be sorted by general grade by clicking the second tab.
Later we will learn how to add students, how to sort them by grade, and how they relate to the master page.
Tag Key Master Page
Finally, we have the Tag Key Master Page. The purpose of this page is to provide a key for the tags you can assign to each student for the convenience of logging behavior. These tags were designed to be used after you have gotten to know your students and can always be updated and changed. You will later know how to apply these tags when we start learning how to add students to our system. You may have to check this page often in the beginning, but soon you will have it memorized. For your benefit, there is a link to this page on every class page as shown below.
Later we will learn how to adjust these tags for your customization, but for now, I will tell you the meanings behind these tags when I created them, and how I used them. If you do not wish to read the detailed definitions of these tags, you may skip to the “Quick Overview” portion.
Firstly, each row of the key table is highlighted in the same color as the tags themselves for easy memorization. Our top tag, “NR,” or “No Response,” is concerning the “RO,” or “Reach Out” tag. Generally, if a student is struggling to keep up in class or might need intervention, I will tag them with the pink “RO” tag, reach out to their resources, and after a few days of no replies or answers, the student will receive the brown “NR” label. This is mainly to keep track of the students who don’t seem to have an active support system, and I will know to find their resource people in person.
The grey “NS,” or “No Show” tag is one I hesitate to associate a student with. This tag is for those kids that you never see in class. Sometimes receiving this label means they are transferring schools, but after I reach out to their parents or support staff and make sure they are not in the middle of an emergency, this tag usually means they don’t appear in your class.
The purple “NHW,” or “No Homework” tag is for those students who refuse to turn in any homework their teachers assign them. Usually, it’s paired with the black and white “MA,” or “Missing Assignments” tag.
The blue “NW” or “No Worries” tag and the green “HW” or “Hard Worker” tag are my favorites to label a student with. These usually mean they have good grades, and/or work hard to achieve great results, and can often be used as a “mini-aide” when handling lots of students at once.
The yellow “DC” or “Difficult Case” tag is used for students who are not a fan of you or the way you teach and are blatantly disrespectful to you. This tag usually means to take caution when helping said student.
The orange “MT” or “Missing Tests” and the black and white “MA” or “Missing Assignments” tags are self-describing. However, I am more comfortable seeing a student have missing assignments than a student with missing tests, because it usually means their grade is low because of said missing test(s). This also helps keep track of what your students should focus on in their free time or for iPass.
The red “FS” or “Focus Student” is for the students who try their hardest in class and with work, but still struggle to meet deadlines or get high scores on their assignments. Students with this tag are usually my first stops when offering help.
We’ve talked about the pink “RO” or “Reach Out” tag when looking at our first tag, but this is usually a reminder to shoot an email or ParentSquare message to the students’ support staff or parents to offer more helpful options for how to help students with this tag.
The brown “FT” or “Failed Tests” tag is assigned to students who didn’t do so well on their weighted assignments. This usually helps me figure out how to help raise a student's grade.
For a quick overview, here is a simplified version of the definitions above:
- NR/ No Response: When you’ve reached out to support staff but received no answer.
- NS/ No Show: Students who skip your class or have high attendance issues.
- NHW/ No Homework: Students who refused to turn in homework.
- NW/ No Worries: Students who do well without your help.
- HW/ Hard Worker: Students who do their best to learn and apply their knowledge.
- DC/ Difficult Case: Students who loudly dislike you- take caution.
- MT/ Missing Tests: There are tests this student hasn’t turned in.
- FS/ Focus Student: Students who are especially struggling- keep your eye on them.
- RO/ Reach Out: A reminder to talk to a student’s resource staff or parents.
- FT/ Failed Tests: There are tests a student has low grades on.
- MA/ Missing Assignments: There are assignments a student has not turned in.
Class Pages Overview
These are the pages you will be looking at the most often. Each class has a unique page with unique views of their tables and unique color-coding for easy association. Here are the classes and their colors:
- Period 1: Red
- Period 2: Yellow
- Period 3: Blue
- Period 4: Green
- Period 5: Pink
- Period 6: White/ Black
- Period 7: Purple
For these pictures, we will be looking at period 1 (red) but every class has the same layout.
From top to bottom, you have the symbol associated with Period 1- a red flower. When you click on it, it will bring up a menu full of emojis and symbols if you want to customize it. Below that is the page’s name, indicating what class page you are on. You may also change this. When I first created this, I used the teacher’s name and the subject they taught. For example, I would title it “Mr. Mitchel - Algebra 1.”
Continuing, you will see a comment left by me informing you of how I used the comment system and how to dismiss it when you feel you know what you’re doing. Then, we see our Tag Key link that we explored before, followed by Period 1’s unique view of the student spreadsheet. The special thing about Notion is that even though this is just a ‘view’ of the master page, you may edit it to your liking and have it affect just period 1’s view or the entire sheet. We will learn how to do this later.
In the middle of the page, you will see a link to a new page labeled “Period 1 | Tests and Quizzes.” This page is for logging the various tests and quizzes given by your teachers and other important information like how a student scored or when they turned it in or if they passed or not. We will tackle learning how to customize this page last.
At the bottom of our page is our previously discovered view of our Responsibilities Master Page where we will collect the various assignments given by our teachers.
Tutorials
Adding Students
Let’s go back to our Period 1 main page. You can do this by either clicking the “Period 1” at the top left or opening the side menu and clicking it from there.
The first place to start is, of course, Period 1’s view of the Student Master Page. To add a student, we will first click one of the “New” buttons as circled above. A blank row should pop up with some of the cells filled with information, like the word “Student” in the cell our cursor is in, and the time we created it.
Let’s start with the student’s name. This cell is already highlighted with a blue box, so I will delete “student” and write the name of the student we are trying to add; “Ashley Bennet.” Pressing the tab button on your computer will move your cursor to the cell under the column name “Tags.” This is where we will assign the tags we talked about earlier. Pressing enter will bring up our list of options. For now, I’m going to type the initials, “HW,” because Ashley tries her best in class. Pressing enter should make the option pop up next to your cursor. From here we can add as many tags as we want, but we will stick with our one for now. Pressing tab will bring us to the next cell.
The column name for this one is “General Grade.” This is where we will input the grade our student has in class. It’s called the “General Grade” because there are no options for + or -. So, if Ashley has a B-, we will just type “B” for her “General Grade.” Pressing enter on this cell will also pop up our options menu, or you can go ahead and just type “b,” then enter, and it will populate.
You may have noticed a checkbox in front of our student’s name. This is to keep track of who’s resources you’ve contacted when contacting many student resources staff at once.
Our example student should look something like the picture below.
If we head back to our full page of the Students Master Page, you will see that Ashley is already populated here. As you add more students in different classes, you will see them here too, but in the different classes, as shown below.
*Please note that any edits you make to the students in the Student Master Sheet version will reflect in their respective class views and vice versa.
Adding Student (Extra)
There is an option for you to leave notes or comments under a student’s page. You see, as you create new rows for new students, you are also creating each student’s personal page. You can find it by hovering over their name and clicking the “Open” button that appears. This will open a side peak window that should be filled with the information we added at the top and open for comments or notes at the bottom. It should look something like the picture below.
You may have noticed a “Red User” symbol next to our student’s name. This is a general icon that means we created a student in Period 1 because it is red. You may customize this symbol with emojis, icons, or custom pictures. When I used this system, I took the student’s picture from Skyward and uploaded it to that icon, that way I could put a name to a face. You may also add these pictures to the open area at the bottom of the page for a better view.
Adding Assignments
To create an assignment, click on the “New” button like we did when adding a student. A blank assignment will pop up, waiting for you to input its values. First, start with the name of the assignment, for this example, I will input the name “Practice 9.5 Quadratic Equations.” This will usually be the exact name from Skyward.
Next, I will press tab, and my cursor will move under the “Chapter” cell. Here I will input that this work was part of chapter 9, as indicated in the name “Practice 9.5.” Then, press tab, again, and you will move to the “Where” cell. This is a drop-down menu, already supplied with some basic options. The question we are answering is, “Where can students find this homework?” Pressing enter will bring up the options we can choose from. Our options are, “Big Ideas Math,” “Canvas,” and, “Paper.” Previously, I was a math IA, and therefore I included “Big Ideas Math.” You may delete and add options in this platform easily, to learn how to do so, please visit the “Extra” section of these instructions.
For now, we will choose “Paper,” as this homework was given out by the teacher on paper. Pressing the tab once more will lead our cursor to move under the “Source” cell. The question we are asking is, “Where can a student find this assignment if they need to do it again?” This process is the same as before, pressing “Enter” will bring up our options for this dropdown. These should be the same across any subject. Our options are “Canvas,” “Class,” and, “Skyward.” We will choose “Class” for this example since it was a paper given out by the teacher in class, thus, the teacher will have copies.
Next, pressing tab will lead us to the “Due” cell. Pressing enter will bring up a calendar. Here, you can click on whichever day this work is due. For our 9.5 example, we will say this is due the following school day. After imputing the date, our row will automatically move to the top of our list of assignments, as this view is sorted by the most recent due date. This is so we don’t have to scroll to find the most recent homework.
Below is what our newly added assignment should look like.
If we head back to our full page of the Responsibilities Master Page, you will see that our 9.5 assignment is already populated here. As you add more homework in different classes, you will see them here too, but in the different classes, as shown below.
As with adding students, our assignments have a place for notes or comments. However, this will look a little different. To open the side pane for the assignments we just made, hover your cursor over the name and click the “Open” button that pops up. It will look like the image below.
The difference between an assignment side view and a student side view is that we have a button in our bottom space instead of it being empty. We can still leave comments, however, the purpose of this space is to log students who have completed the assignment. Pressing the “Add Student” button will add a checkbox along with the text “Last, First.” This is where we input the names of our students starting with the last name followed by the first name. This is an automatic order, but you may change the text at any time. For example, I wrote my students’ names like this; “First L.” We use the checkbox only if this student has finished this assignment.
Now, you will have a lot more than one student, so you can press the “Add Student” button as many times as you need. If you press too many, you may delete them using the backspace button. As useful as this button is, in some classes, you will have many students, and pressing the button and typing student’s names in every assignment might feel tedious. We can set up a way to automatically populate with your students. If this sounds interesting to you, I will put the full tutorial in the “Extra” section.
Below is an example of what it will look like with a few more students.
Adding Assignments (Extra)
You may have noticed there are a few empty cells I didn’t talk about, the ones titled “Grades” and “Link.” These are completely optional. If you need quick access to the assignment and it’s available via a link, you may want to include the URL of where the homework is found and where the grades are. This is mostly used if you have any work on Big Ideas Math or Canvas, as there are different links to the work and its grades. Since our example is being done in class and we can find the grades on Skyward, we left these blank.
If you would like to make your students’ names show up automatically, we first need to close our side view. You can do this by simply clicking out of it, or the arrows on the top left. As shown below, you want to start by clicking the blue arrow to the side of the blue “New” button.
Once you click that button, a small menu will appear. This is called the “Template Menu.” It will look like the figure below.
As you can see, there are many template options already included here. All these do is make sure that if you create an assignment in Period 1, the assignment you created will be labeled “Period 1,” as with Period 2, will be labeled “Period 2,” etc. Because we are looking at period 1’s view, the default should be period 1. To add our students automatically, we will edit this template.
Click on the three dots as shown below.
This should bring up a smaller menu with a few things we can do with this template. For our purposes, we will click the “Edit” button. The template will appear in a center view with a warning at the top letting you know you are editing a template and not a specific assignment. The page should look like the figure below.
Because this is a template and not an actual assignment, anything we change here will be reflected every time we create new homework. Because of this, we should leave the due date, where, source, grades link, and assignment link blank as these will change with every assignment. However, when you know you will be working on a specific chapter for a while, you may add the chapter number so it will automatically be included when making a new page.
If we scroll down, we will see the same button we saw in our example assignment. Because we want to add our students who are in this class, we will press the “Add Student” button until we have all of our students on this page.
To exit this screen, simply click the back button on the top left or click out of the window, it will be saved. Now, if we click the “New” button again to add another assignment and open the page, we will see the things we added to the template are already there.
You may do this with every period with their respective students, just go to the class’s home page and change the template the same way we did here.
If you want to change our drop-down menu options, first we have to double-click on the title of the column that has the options we want to change. For this example, we will change the “Where” column in our assignments.
In this menu, there are quite a few things we can change about our property. At the top of the blue box, you may change the name of the column. You can change the sort order, hide the column, duplicate it, or outright delete it. For our purposes, we are going to click the “Edit property” button under the name. This should open a menu as shown below.
Again, we may do several things in this menu also, such as changing the type of property or changing the options themselves. If you wish to add an option, click the “+” button at the top, as shown circled in red below, or change already created options by clicking the arrow next to the option you want to change, as shown circled in blue below.
When creating a new option, you may simply type what you want the option to be, for example, if you want to add one that says “Google Sheets,” type it in the box that appears after clicking the “+” button. When changing an option, a mini-menu will pop up after you’ve clicked the “>” next to the said value, as shown below.
This is where you may change the name, as indicated in the blue box at the top, delete it entirely, as highlighted, or change its color.
Adding Tests and Quizzes
Last but not least, we will learn how to create and manage our tests and quizzes, which is the hardest part- so please read carefully.
First, we will need to open our test page. Click the link in the middle of your class that says “Period 1 | Tests and Quizzes.” Every class will have its own page and will say its respective class period. This page should be blank except for a note from me and a button that reads “Add a New Test or Quiz.”
When we click said button, a blank chart for a test or quiz will appear below the button. This also means that your most recent tests or quizzes will be at the top, with the oldest at the bottom.
From here, just as we are added a student or assignment, we will click the “New” button. We will fill these cells as we have done before, starting with the student name, the date the test was given, when it was submitted, if they have or have not completed it if they were assisted, the raw score, how much the late penalty will be, and the weighting of the test. The late penalty and weighting will both be percentages. Columns “Pass/Fail,” “Days Late,” “Final,” and, “Weighted Grade” will automatically populate based on the information you fill in.
At Perry Township, most teachers will not have a late penalty (therefore making it 0%) and they grade on a 14-point scale (therefore the Weighting will be 14%).
Quick Tip
Notion is very similar to Google Docs or Google Sheets, in this way, we can populate a field by clicking and dragging a number to the other empty cells. I will show you how to below.
First, click the topmost value you want to share with the other cells. For this example, we are choosing the due date because the test will be given out to all the students on the same day as shown below.
Simply clicking it will highlight the cell in blue, and then you can click and hold to drag it down to the rest of the cells. When they are filled with the information, they will all be highlighted in blue.
I also recommend doing this with the late penalty and weighting metrics as they will be the same for every student.
The finished product should look like the picture below.
Quick Note
The Pass/Fail column changes based on the Final grade. If the grade is 69 or below, it says “Fail,” if it is 70–99, it says “Pass,” but for 100, it says “YAY!!” so that we can celebrate when they finish with great success.
There are different views of this table for your convenience. Not only can you see how your students are doing with the test, but you can also quickly tell who’s turned in or not turned in their tests by clicking the “Submissions” tab. It will look like the picture below.
The “Grade” tab is similar to the “Overview” tab, but it sorts the student’s grades by lowest on top and highest on bottom that are finished.
Now, just like when adding students or assignments, we can streamline this process by editing the template. However, this is a little different. I recommend following these steps because the point of this sheet is to save you time, and inputting all that information for every test or quiz is quite tedious. I will explain as clearly as possible.
Reminder: We are only changing the test template for Period 1, we will have to follow these steps for the different classes and their respective students.
To change what populates when you add a new test or quiz, we need to edit the button that creates these tables. You can find the settings for our button from the gear that appears when you hover over the “Add a New Test or Quiz” button.
After we click this, a new menu will pop up. This is similar to the edit template page but is for editing our button and what appears when you click it. See the figure below.
At the top is the name of the button, “Add a New Test or Quiz,” which you may rename if you like. Our focus is going to be at the bottom, where the template for a new chart is. Just as we did for the empty chart example, we will add rows for each student, and write their names in the name column. We want these to be in every new test so we don’t have to write our student’s names often.
We will leave the “Due” and “Submitted” columns empty because every test will have a different date.
Next, if we scroll to the right, we want to see the “Late Penalty” and “Weighting” columns because these will also stay the same for every test. As I said above, most teachers are the same, their late penalty will be 0% and our 14-point grading scale will be 14% in the weighting column. Because it’s the same for every student, we can use our quick tip to drag our 0% and 14% to fill all the student’s cells.
Below is what the late penalty and weighting columns look like.
This is all the information we want to include here. Many of these cells have functions that auto-populate if they have the right values. For example, columns titled “Pass/Fail,” “Days Late,” “Final,” and, “Weighted Grade,” are automatically calculated based on various values that you input. To close this menu, click the blue “Done” button on the top right.
The next time you click that button to create a new test or quiz, it should appear with our edited information already populated.
Summary
Thank you for being patient and finishing this tutorial with me. As a reminder, the purpose of this note system is for efficiency and convenience. It creates convenience by keeping all our student’s information that we need to help them in a single place and it creates efficiency by making the data able to be understood in 5 seconds or less, without sharing the sensitive info that's on Skyward.
It is also completely optional; I created this system because it was easier for me to log how my students were doing and quickly help them, but not everyone has the same methods as me. Also, I didn’t update this information daily, so if I spent my Monday updating things, I could go the whole week without needing to open Skyward unless I needed to reach out to resource staff. I will also be posting a how-to video to follow along with this written tutorial that will only be available to Perry Schools employees.
Again, thank you so much for taking this journey with me, I hope this was helpful.