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