What I did in school today: 5/7/13

Today was the first crunch day for my eToy project.  (See old post to learn more about eToy or read below*.)  At the close of school yesterday, bidding ended for week 1.  Originally, weeks were going to run from Monday to Friday, but then I realized I'd be spending my weekends dealing with this.  Instead a bidding week begins on Wednesday, ends on Monday, and I give myself Tuesday to catch up.  Luckily, today I was able to catch up quickly, so bidding has resumed.

• First, I had to hide the link to the eToy store so that no one tried bidding while I was working on it.
• Then, I had to check all my Google Drive links to see who the high bidders were.  Also, I had to make sure that bidding was done properly (e.g. bid must be higher than the previous bid, no bidding on two items at the same time, no bidding against yourself).
• Next, I had to record who the high bidders were, their teachers' names, what toys they were buying, the amounts of their bids, and from whose class the toys came from.
• I had to remove the old toys from the website and replace them with new ones.
• For each Google form I had to duplicate each worksheet, rename it (to week 1), go back to the main worksheet, delete all the previous bids, change the names of the toys (easier than creating 30 more forms), and then edit the names of the forms.  It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get rolling, it's not so bad.
• Finally, I had to unhide the eToy link.

*I thought that it were me, I probably wouldnt go to the link, so here's a description of eToy from the earlier post.

My colleague, June Jones, turned me on to this idea several years ago.  Modeled after eBay, eToy is a project/website where students can earn money and bid on gently used toys.  Originally, she used a database created by someone else.  I wanted to do my own thing, so I created forms in Google Docs (now Google Drive) for the students to make bids.  These forms are connected to a spreadsheet.  Students first check the online spreadsheet to see what the current high bid is for any given toy and then go to the form to make a bid.