Excel is a valuable productivity tool especially with the switch in teaching paradigms. Teaching used to be considered an art, but more and more it is becoming a science. Every instructional decision has to be backed up with data and Excel is a really nice way of managing numerical data.
The Excel assignment was a nice practice assignment for me, but not a real challenge. My AP sends me excel assignments to do for him all the time so the functions that we were using are something that I have a lot of experience with. We have a large database that contains all of the testing data for students in our county. This database allows us to query various reports and import the data into Excel for further adjustments. I use the conditional sort a lot.
I don't usually have multiple pages so it was neat to learn about the dynamic page changing. I could see that being really useful if something on each page needs changed like a header. I found the ExtraCredit option particularly interesting because I don't get into the statistical functions very often. I could see that as a nice quick and dirty check to evaluate correlations. I liked the context of checking the success of a test in comparison to the success of a homework assignment. That is a nice way to see which homework assigments may need tweeking to be more useful to the students.
“Every instructional decision has to be backed up with data and Excel is a really nice way of managing numerical data” How this statement rings very true for a classroom teacher. I can recall several times sitting in parent conferences and having to justify why a student was failing my algebra class. It was a good feeling to know that all my grades where done on Excel.
ReplyDelete“The Excel assignment was a nice practice assignment for me”. For me it was a review from when I used to teach high school math. I used Excel to calculate my student’s averages and even post the missing homework assignments on the bulletin board. This allowed both the students and I to keep close track of their grades.
"I don't usually have multiple pages so it was neat to learn about the dynamic page changing." I, too, didn’t know about this feature that Excel had. I normal used copy and paste for each new 9 weeks.
Gina M
I enjoyed the assignment as well. I had a bit tougher time than you seemed to. I am not currently teaching and it had been quite a while since I used Excel. I found some of the tasks a bit challenging.
ReplyDeleteI did find it interesting you pointed out the shift between teaching being an art to becoming more of a science. I feel that this is a pretty common conception about it now, but I still feel that we should approach it as a bit of both. I know it seems a little impossible considering many people view these as opposites, but I feel that developing a specific teaching style to be effective to each individual student is extremely important. Yet, it is also important to use the science and available tools in an effort to aid in education. What do you think? Can it be both?
Justin, I really appreciate your comment about trying to balance between teaching as the art and teaching as the science. I think that is a good place to be. It seems like anytime we dive too deep in any one direction we end up swinging to another direction with just a matter of time.
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