Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Spreadsheets in the Classroom
I have used spreadsheets for graphing activities in the classroom for years. Making graphs is very difficult for special needs students, so creating them with Excel has simplified that for them. As a bonus they are neat enough for the teacher to grade... Through exploration of spreadsheets on Google Docs and work with applying mathematical functions to the sheet, I've thought of some ways I'd like to try to implement spreadsheets with my students. The main one is to try to have them develop a basic budget sheet to work with during our personal finance unit. I will probably opt to have them use Excel spreadsheets for the activity, since I found Google Spreadsheets to be confusing and not as user friendly. Also, I won't have to deal with the school district filter system blocking my students from Google Docs on the days I'm planning to do the lesson, which is an ongoing frustration whenever I plan a web based lesson.
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3 comments:
Filtering seems to be the bane of many a well planned lesson. I find you idea of budgeting valuable - good luck implementing.
If I were to use a spreadsheet with my class I think I would try to use excel as well. I did find the one in google docs was a little harder to navigate through. The spreadsheet project would be very new to my students so I would need something that would be very user friendly that my students would be able to comprehend.
You could also make a table for keeping information. I've had my class do that with different information with Science and Math. That's helped in the past. There's a ton more out there to do with Spreadsheets, too.
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