Another Use For Microsoft Excel

This past school year, we were faced with the task of tracking and monitoring textbooks going home with our middle school students. Teachers were being told they would have to do the tracking themselves, which meant the teachers were coming up with all kinds of manual tracking forms and procedures. When I found out about this, I knew there should be a way for the technology we have at the school to accommodate this better. I tried a little experiment in the library and found the answer:

If you make up a list of your students in Excel, you can turn it into a mini database and use the library's bar code reader to enter the numbers from the textbooks for you.

I made one for each grade level. It took 20 minutes for a class of 25 with three textbooks per student to get everyone entered in. I sent the lists to the teachers, and did so again at the end of the school year when the students turned their books in.

Microsoft Excel

For Excel, we began by showing the students a presentation I made a few years back on the value of an education. This presentation not only shows the numbers (from U.S. Census Data) of the increased pay based upon educational attainment, but I worked the numbers, showing how much money approximately each level of educational attainment would have in their budget for housing and used pictures to show what type of housing you could afford with that money. These students don't have a good concept of money, but they do know the difference between a mobile home and a multi-million dollar mansion.

We then had the students using MS Excel to update the numbers to the latest release, crunch the numbers to see the side-by-side comparison of how well (and not so well) earnings are keeping up.

The next thing we did, based upon the How-To's on the Microsoft web site, was to have the students make timelines on Excel. It's another feature generally not used.

Microsoft Word

The past two school years I've been teamed with the school librarian to teach an elective for our 7th and 8th grade students. The first year we were given two days notice of this class, so we had difficulty in coming up with a curriculum for the class. This past year, however, I was a little more assertive and we had a tech class.

The students span the entire spectrum of the learning curve, however we made sure everyone kept up.

The first thing we did was to make a list of what the students were lacking in with regards to knowledge of the technology. Even things as basic as adding a picture and formatting it on MS Word.

So, I used text from the Jane Austen book "Sense and Sensibility" (it's in the public domain) and taught the kids how to format the text appropriately, not just for a term paper but also for a publication. We then added copyright approved pictures, columns, Word Art for the title and a drop cap to dress it up.

Welcome!

Welcome to my educational technology blog. There is so much going on with the field of educational technology that I thought I'd start this to see where it leads.

I'll be posting things that I've done over the last 5 years as well as things others have done.

I work at a K-8 Title 1 public school, running the computers. I am not a fully certified teacher, I am certified as a substitute and am employed as a classified staff member. The campus is primarily using Apple Computers, so pretty much everything I'll be talking about will be based on Macs.

I also use one at home, as it helps me to try things out for the teachers and students.

In the course of a school year I use for projects:

Mac OSX Snow Leopard
iLife 09 (I now have v. 11 on my home computer)
MS Office For Mac 2008
Pixie
Inspiration

I have used iWork, however as the computers for high school are Windows, I've not taught it.

For hardware I've used:

MacBooks and MacBook Pros
iMacs
Mac Minis
Smartboard® Interactive Whiteboards & Airliners
AverMedia Document Cameras
And a whole variety of different projectors and printers.