Microsoft excel is one of the most commonly used and useful software programs. It can process data for businesses, home budgets, and classroom monitoring. For the classroom it can monitor the reach of the learning of students. It can also organize grades and easily process retake scores with no more effort than the teacher just putting in the new number.
I loved the colorful effects that the program has and the way of presenting the data with bar graphs and pie graphs. It had various formulas to choose from to process data, so it's a very flexible program. It will also be a wonderful tool in presenting to the school administrators, since it has such visually appealing pie charts and bar charts to display the data.
The excel quiz was very simple after reading the tutorial. I ended up getting a 9 out of 9 on the first try. It did learn about some equations that I had never heard of before the tutorial.
In the reading, "Teaching Students to Use the Internet as a Research Tool," I discovered ideas that I hadn't thought about. When I do an internet search, I never thought about using more specific search engines like Argos and MathSearch. Other search engines index the entire web which makes the researcher use very specific Boolean techniques or else they'll have thousands of results. Using other search engines also make the researcher have to check the validity of the web page and see what biase it has and if it has credible supporters who have linked to that page. The article also had a lot of web sites for teachers to use, so I'll definitely look at those after I finish tech class and have more free time. :)
In the meantime, I'll be doing some software testing. So far I've found www.riverdeep.net a keeper! I've been not only testing it for potential use with the Algebra II tutorials, I've been using it to study for my CSET on March 17th. At least the CSET is making me test software that is VERY relevant to upper level math right now. I think that I'll let some of my new math teaching friends about this web site, so that they can show how quadratics are used in real life. That's a question that I keep hearing students ask, "Why do I need to know this?" Those tutorials definitely answer that question and teach in a visual and auditory style that keeps my attention.
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I also liked the colorful effects Excel has to offer. I think it makes the page easier to read and it highlights areas of significance. Thanks for adding the url for the website you found. I plan on looking it up as soon as I'm done with this posting. The article from ISTE mentioned using people you know to find websites they have already evaluated. I think it helps when trying to find valauble sources from the internet.
I am not a huge excel person, infact I only knew enough to get into this class, but when we went through it in class I just fell in love with it! I also had never thought about using specific search engines to find information. I always use google to find information I am looking for, but know that I know that I can find information easier by using a different search engine I will definetly be looking in to those more!
I think that excel is an amazing program avaliable today. People often don't know how to use these programs or even know that they exist. Excel is definitely domething that makes a teacher's life that much easier.
As far as other search engines go, I haven't checked out any others than google. I think that people don't know about others because they haven't heard of them, or just don't know that they exist. As soon as these sites get their names out, they will begin to be so much more popular!
Hi Tristen, I too am taking the cset on saturday but besides that I agree with you that the use of color on spreadsheets is really wonderful. Too many times do you see boring charts and graphs. I am glad that we were shown how to use color and make bright graphs and charts because it makes our work much more interesting and nicer to look at.
I really like your idea about using www.riverdeep.net to help you study for the CSET exam...I might just do the same myself. Thanks!
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