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