Sandra’s ICT Blog

Portfolio Item GradebookThis week the lesson in ICT was hectic! I mean the week prior I felt confident with all the formulas that we were utilising in our practice spreadsheet… but this week was another whole can of fish (how cool is that analogy lol). This week I went into my tutorial having populated my spreadsheet with 18 rows of data for the 18 students in my ’supposed’ class. On reflection I can say that I found this computer lab tutorial to be extraordinarily hard. I think the hardest thing was the substitution of the ‘$’ into the formulae when completing calculations and percentages and ranks on excel. I mean by the end of the lesson I was able to complete all the necessary elements of my spreadsheet, but I can understand why the teacher I am doing my practical with would rather manually mark a grade book and manually take down the students’ scores for their spelling tests etc.  I think that the end result of my spreadsheet was overall quite good. I was able to include the necessary formulae and a chart with the students’ percentages. As hard as I did indeed find this lesson at least I was able to meet the challenging formulae, incorporating them into my spreadsheet. I suppose the main thing with Microsoft Excel is overall getting the hang for the formulas and their applications. I think that with practice I will be surer of myself in using this program… but it will take time. Again, just as last week I think that this excel is a great way for managing class data, especially that of numerical data such as scores and such.  

I think the most exciting component of the Excel program is that you are able to have the data entered represented visually in graphs. I think that the visual stimulation would be key in activities when students are using Excel and hopefully when I am able to get more involved, teaching lessons and such, in my practical I will have a go at introducing a lesson where the students will enter current weather data into excel. After entering their data I will then guide them in creating a graph presenting it. I think that students would take really well to an excel task such as this and would be intrigued and more excited about a program that students would generally associating with ‘Daddy’s accounting’.

I think that as a trial in my first year of teaching i will test out excel as a means for keeping data and such, and if it doesn’t exactly cater to my needs i can always adapt myself to a more manual approach. I think that the students would take well to the fact that their teacher would be using technology in everyday data keeping activities and would intrigue them more so in their approaches to interactive computer technologies.

Anyway that is all for this week…. coming up: my reflection on the much-loved PowerPoint!

 xoxo

Last week for my week 7 tutorial with Mark Lee we embarked on a lesson dedicated to spreadsheets. As this lesson was more so an introduction to spreadsheets i picked up on a lot of helpful tips when using the program. What puzzled me though was that this appears to be such a great program that teachers can utilise for keeping rolls and students’ marks up to date, although i have never seen the teacher i am currently completing my practical teaching with use it. I suppose that she is still stuck in the Stone Age… marking a roll book and recording marks… such is life. But regardless, when I am a teacher I can definitely say even at this point in time that spreadsheets are going to cater to all of my organisational needs! According to Newby, 2004: Examples of uses for Excel spreadsheets-

 When looking at this table I can see myself adapting a number of these spreadsheet uses for when I am a teacher. From using the excel program as a storage for grades and marks, to create class seating charts, designing spelling lists for tests and keeping track of attendance I can see that excel is going to become my adopted ‘baby’. I think that excel will also have major benefits for the students I will be working with from helping them create charts with goals and graphing of the weather for mathematics tasks. On my practical in the coming weeks I am going to definitely question the teacher I am working with about her knowledge, understanding and implementation of excel in the classroom for my personal knowledge. It was also in this week 7 workshop that I decided to in fact take some of the excel tutorials recommended by Mark. I found that by completing these tutorials I was more adept at being able to keep pace with Mark in the following lesson when creating my spreadsheet and utilising the many formulas. I found this tutorial extremely helpful in getting to know the basics of the formulas and their explicit applications. Instead of simply calculating the sum of a students marks myself I will simply be able to utilise the sum function, saving me both time and effort.

I was never exactly confident about working with spreadsheets… but! Now I can conclude that I will be more than happy to implement them within my classroom. My students will be a group who hopefully will be technology adept under my careful guidance and knowledge.

Thats all for this week!

xoxo

Portfolio Item 4 This is the 4th portfolio item that i have been working on for the past few hours lol I had a lot of fun with being able to actually come up with items of my life that i would class as ‘interesting’. I was digging deep but eventually found some elements that weren’t too obscure. I really love the way that when using published you can express yourself so easily and creatively. I think that if i ever actually give a lesson on bibliographic writing i will definitely have my students presenting their work on publisher!

My Image References (alphabetical order)

  Images taken from:  

· General Teacher Resources [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved April 16, from http://www.suelebeau.com/genteachresources.htm 

· Newcastle Knights [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://Newcastle-knights-news.newslib.com/ 

· Snow Patrol Final Straw [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://www.snow-patrol.net/  

· So you think you can dance Australian auditions (Melbourne) [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://www.dancing.net.au/sytycd-melbourne-auditions/  

· Womens Shoes [Image] (n.d.). Retrieved April 16, 2008, from http://www.mycatwalk.com.au/fashion/womens-shoes.html  

Okai i would consider myself a little bit of a ‘newbie’ in regards to the program Microsoft Publisher. According to Mark the program can be used for the creation of brochures and most importantly! autobiographies! lol. From my limited experience on publisher in my ed1113 class (seeing as i dont have the program at home) i think the program would have a number of great implications for classroom students. For a number of reasons i think that i would prefer to use Microsoft Publisher with my students rather than word based on Publisher. Firstly Publisher tends to offer layout guides as well as customisation of layout, which would extend my future already computer literate students (because lets face it the youth today have taken to computers and programs extremely well and fast) compared to Word. Simply, the program is easy to utilise for design purposes and ‘professional’ publishing purposes as well. Though the major drawback is simply that access of Publisher at home will be unlikely as was the case in my ed1113 class.

 Everything in regards to technology from my practical observations has been implemented with the purpose of extending the student. I think that a program like Publisher when used correctly will cater to extending the child’s computer literacy mostly in regards to the improvement of application design, a worthy ability indeed. I think that by utilising this program i will be able to set my future students on a path where they will be more able to present work of a higher standard through the Publisher program which will reflect on their professionalism in their work.

 Ed1113 is doing wonders for my confidence in regards to classroom technologies so much to the point that in my most recent practical i was confident enough to aid them in their powerpoint presentations and most importantly with their work on Publisher!