Here's a great article about using Excel in the classroom:
http://www.education-world.com/a_tech/tech/tech079.shtml
This teacher uses Excel with her 7th and 8th graders to not only teach them math, but to show its applications in the "real world." She says, "To teach percentages is one thing, but to give an application and be able to forecast change is a powerful lesson."
The article gives some great ideas, has student examples, and gives links to related websites.
I found this interesting because I almost did a screen capture for last week's project involving Excel. I couldn't come up with a good activity, however, that seemed relevant and exciting, and thus didn't end up using Excel. Now, however, I've got tons of great ideas. The good thing is, too, that Excel is a program most people have on their computers. Even Mac users tend to have Microsoft Office these days. This makes it a little easier to give computer assignments to students. They can go to the library or work on computers at home on Excel projects without having to download new software (for example, Geometer's Sketchpad.)
I'd love to use some of the ideas listed in the article following a lesson on tables and graphs. My students do well with that material, but don't usually see "the point." Having them apply what they've learned by using Excel is a great way to help them see connections between the math we learn and the world around us.
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3 comments:
Thanks for the page! I can see the uses in science too. The page listed showed up as being out of date, but a quick search for Excel brought up over 200 hits within their homepage. I found a good tutorial for setting up and using a template. You're right, there are a pile of uses for this program throughout the curricular areas.
Thanks for turning me onto it :)
I never realized the power of Excel from both a learning and utilization standpoint until I took Statistics. I was, out of necessity, forced to learn various statistical functions by long-hand. Mean, median, and mode were fairly simple. Analysis of variance, on the other hand, was a completely different story. What Excel did in the latter was arrange the data in table form, the components of which were easily identifiable and understandable.
Of course, spreadsheet technology is the basis for a teacher's greatest tool, the electronic gradebook, and it has so many wonderful educational applications, particularly in science and mathematics. I am glad to see that our students are being consistently exposed to this. Thanks for sharing this!
That's funny, when I copy-paste the link, it still works on my computer. Wonder why you got an "out of date" message...?
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