Mail Merge to give back documents to students

Mail merge has always been a favourite of mine for creating documents and so when I discovered I had 89 or so G7 students this year I quickly decided that Mail merge would be perfect for creating assessment documents to hand back to students.  I found the limitation was that microsoft doesn’t have a smart way to create separate documents rather than all the new merged documents being created in the same file.  I did some research and found a macro online but have had some issues making this run every time and so could not safely recommend it to everyone.

Basically, if you use excel to save and store all of your assessment information you can then build a template in Word and then merge the data into the fields creating individual documents for your students.  These can then be safely put into their portfolios or emailed home (this is a merge option) which allows digital assessment rather than paper copies and also makes things look much smarter.  You can store anything on the template and so I have found that I tend to put more detail which can be time consuming, but it does give a lot of information back to students when it cones time to report and reflect.

I understand that Google drive now has a more user friendly approach through their autocrat script and I am keen to trial that in my next assessment. You can read more in the meantime from my tech-lovin’ other half, Mr Hamada.