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Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Excel and Ch. 11: Databases & Spreadsheets

I am so excited about what I have learned already in this course.  Before last week, the only thing I had ever known how to do in Excel was input numbers into the spreadsheet and make a graph.  Now I am able to make an entire interactive quiz that incorporates many features that I had no idea even existed.  When I showed my quiz to one of my roommates, who is also in the education program, she was just as amazed as I was and wanted me to show her how to do it so that she could possibly use the program when she is student teaching and/or in her future classroom.  I never thought that Excel would be very useful in the English classroom.  Now, however, I can see that with quizzes such as the one I made, charts, timelines, webbing, graphs and I'm sure so much more, the possibilities are endless to really engage the class.

The reading for this week was also very interesting.  I agree with the text about introducing databases and spreadsheets to students early.  I think programs like Excel clearly provide many useful tools that students can utilize if they are aware of them and know how to use them.  With so many ways of using these programs, I don't think it would be very difficult to find a way to incorporate databases and spreadsheets into the curriculum at every age level and every subject in one way or another.