Spreadsheets

I personally have never been a big fan of Excel. Reason being that I never knew how to use it and just gave up on it because I thought it was to hard to learn. But after going over this program in class I really do like it now. I think it can be useful in class to show the students different types of graphs, how to organize things, and is just a good visual aid for those learners that learn from seeing things. I also think that using excel for your grade book could be beneficial because of the time you save from having to breakout calculators and pencilling in everything. Plus it is a lot easier to change grades and it makes it look a lot cleaner vs. pencil erasing. I would definitely use this program in my classroom. Anything that would make my job easier is always put to good use in my classroom.

I think as a teacher we would use these things to lighten our work load is a lot of the reason. I think another good reason is because it make things look more professional. One of the advantages over a calculator would be that once it is on the spreadsheet it is calculated and recorded. But if you do something with a calculator then you write it on the paper, then recorded it in the grade book, and then most schools make you put it into the computer anyways. So why not cut all that other stuff out and just use the spread sheet and be done with it?? Makes sense to me to just use the spreadsheet.