Excel Ideas

As a teacher sent to a workshop on excel and being asked to share ideas at a faculty meeting, I came back with the following ideas and suggestions for the use of excel:

1. Placing the grades on an excel spreadsheet enables teachers to structure and organize the data to interpret it in numerous ways. Averages can be taken effortlessly. We did do this in class but you can take it a step further and produce statistics (ie: Boys vs. girls for example if needed) can be sorted out. This method helps teachers to evaluate how well the students do on assessments and tweak lessons or return to lessons accordingly. This data can be shared at faculty, team or departmental meetings. Other teachers with the same subject can show their data and problems can be worked out if one teachers data is askew. (Could be valuable for a department head looking into their teachers performances).

2. Keeping a record in excel of attendance also enables teachers to manipulate data. If a teacher wishes to see if a student who claims he/she wasn't present on a certain day, it would be very easy to sort the data to see if correct.

3. If an assignment is given with multiple due dates of materials throughout the semester, data can be stored and manipulated. You would set up columns of due dates and the assignments and the students names. This way, you could easily see who has not handed in one of the assignments and flag that or let the student know. You could show this spreadsheet as a link on your website to let students access it and see if they have any material missing. You could also post their grades here for the assignment and could import it into the grades spreadsheet when finished.

4. You could actually have a lesson plan that teaches students how to use excel for the management of their own needs. They will surely benefit from it in college and the work world. To keep them up to snuff on these programs that make life easier is very valuable. You would teach them while using content specific data from a lab, for example.

5. You can have the students in science or various other subjects utilize the charts, tables etc for submitting homework, labwork or other assignments. The various charts can manipulate data in many ways. Letting them know that excel does this is a great lesson to be taught.