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.