My tips & tricks using iDoceo on my iPad as a Science teacher.

6 min readNov 25, 2018

My school recently made a move from using Planbook to iDoceo as a lesson planning app for teachers. Teachers are provided with a school iPad for anything work related including the iDoceo app is paid by the school.

As a geeky Science teacher, I began my experimentation and after more than a year, I’m now sharing my experience including how I implement this app in my daily workflow.

I’m going to split this into several parts;

Lessons planning – Scheme of Work etc.
Seating plans.
Mark sheets/Gradebook for assessments.

This post is purely on my workflow. If you want to read how to set up classes and your timetable, click here (COMING SOON, SORRY).

Lesson planning

The policy at my school requires teachers to have some form of evidence of lesson planning – this does not mean a full blown lesson plan like when you are in PGCE/NQT/Observations – just a title, lesson outcomes & activities.

In Science, all of our lesson materials (i.e. slides & worksheets) are pre prepared by our teachers and sorted in order – saved in our shared drive. This has been created according to the Scheme of Work provided by the AQA (Our exam board). In the SoW, it details the learning outcomes, number of hours allocated for the section and suggested activities.

So how do I get all of this information to a lesson plan on iDoceo?

1. iDoceo have a feature to import a diary template in Excel (.xls) format.

Learning outcomes from AQA Scheme of Work can be easily copied across to the Excel file. Using the pre-prepared slides & also the recommended duration hours for each lesson sections, I can arrange this in the excel file. I can plan a rough starter and plenary – usually all of this has been pre-planned in the slides/resources bank that we have. Here’s an example of how it looks like in Excel; (TIPS: Hold Alt+Enter to add a line break – so it looks neat and tidy)

2. Bump lessons forward or backwards.

All of the lessons can be pre-planned well in advance and can also be shared with colleagues easily. Once this has been imported to your class diary, there’s this nifty feature where you can bump forward or backwards the lessons. So let’s say, for some reason you can’t finish that lesson or you’re off sick or the kids has something else planned and they not gonna be in – you can bump everything forward. So all of your planned lessons shifted one lesson up.

3. Use the icons!

Just to make it nice but also as a reminder – you can add icons to the lesson you’ve planned. What I usually do is;

Pen & paper icon – for assessments (tests etc)
Hazard symbol – for practicals (so I can make sure I have the equipments ready)

4. Export your planner.

Sometimes the head of department or whoever wanna see my planning, I can simply show what I’ve done by exporting them to PDF or email to them directly. Also, sometimes teachers use this as a weekly requisition to forward them to their lab technicians, so they can plan what practical equipment they need for the following week.

Seating Plans

This is a major improvement compared to using PowerPoint putting the student names in text boxes and rearrange them. What I find good about it;

Ability to import pictures easily (using their face recognition feature & you can export pictures from SIMS and manually import them on iDoceo) – makes the seating plan more personal rather than just names in boxes.
Ability to overlay information from a mark sheet (or grade book) on the seating plan. For example, you want to show information such as their progress in last assessment as an overlay on their picture so you have a rough idea who should seats with tho. Obviously there are a lot more things to take account of but this is a cool feature.
Show students as badges. Their badge may contains information of – for example – SEN status, Pupil Premium, Progress, Target etc. This format is what I usually use during observations.
Easily swap students – rather than drag and drop one by one. Easily form groups – including based on a column in your mark sheet (gradebook).
Export as PDF to wherever. I usually export to my Google Drive, display it on the projector as the students come in, and they sort themselves out. Obviously, I only show them the seating plan with their names & pictures only, not their peers personal information etc.
Random picker – great for randomly select students for questioning (Assessment for Learning)
Colour coded students.

Marksheets/Gradebook

This app is a good way to centralised your mark sheets. We do have SIMS mark sheets, but they are mostly for formal assessments. What do I usually do with it?

1. Automatically convert grades. I can add raw marks, the app can automatically convert to percentage or any grade boundaries you’ve set. There’s a lot of Grade Types configuration available. You can play around with it, but here’s what I usually use.

2. Group columns as one. For example, some assessments consists of two or more papers, so I can get an average of them by grouping, then convert them to my grade boundaries.

3. Colour code columns – for example, I colour code the parent group as that’s the main grades I’m interested with. You can also colour code students – for example if there’s a particular student you want to focus on as they not doing so well, you can highlight them so it will appear on every mark sheets.

4. Colour code cell based on grade boundaries.

5. Export to numerous outputs such as Excel, custom student reports, to another iDoceo app user, pdf and also Google Classroom.

6. Link to Google Classroom. Grades on Classroom can be imported & synced in a column on iDoceo mark sheet – and grades on iDoceo can be exported to an assignment on Classroom.

I think that is all for now. I will update this as I go. I’m also planning to post more about how to set up iDoceo.

I’m lucky enough to be given this app for free paid by the school. However, if I wasn’t, I happily pay the small cost. The app developer, Bert, is also very attentive and quick to respond to any issues or feedback you have. I’m now on their beta program and the amount of improvement they’ve developed has been awesome!

This post was written on my iPad Pro and all annotations using my Apple Pencil! 📱

Any questions or suggestions, feel free to tweet me at @MrKhairi_. THANKS!