As I read the section, I thought that they really went into great depth with some of the lessons. There was planning to the nth degree, which is amazing, but I have a hard time seeing when I would have similar time to create a similar lesson. I absolutely love Excel and use it far more than word processing software. I think it is critical for students to understand how to use this software because employers are amazed at an employee who knows how to use this program, as I’ve seen from experience. I feel that after reading the section that I’m either going to have to create some lessons or find some on the web that will help me use this program in some of my classes.
I thought that what I could do to integrate Excel into my classroom would be to graph some responses from a survey that my Sociology students took earlier in the year. We have all of the responses by class, so all we’d have to do is enter the data into spreadsheets to allow the students to learn some of the functionality of the program and allow the students to see what it does, especially when it comes to creating a graph.
Being a social studies teacher, I find that it’s a bit challenging to fit Excel into a class exercise. I think it can break up the instruction to use the program to graph certain information, but it seems a bit of a novelty in some sense. That being said, I could see where introducing the program at younger grade levels like my seventh and eighth graders will encourage them to use it later on for other projects.
You teach in a different world than I, meaning kindergarten are their own species. I would imagine it would be exciting to have the ability to integrate so much technology due to age group. Do you find it difficult to fit Excel into your routine because of time or content? In kindergarten, if I were to use a type of spreadsheet and graph for social studies, I would probably have students vote for their favorite historical hero studied.
ReplyDeleteI like your idea of having your sociology students use excel to look at their different responses to your survey. It would also be intersting to compare your class's results to that of another perhaps in a different region of the country. If you or someone you know knows a teacher of history or sociology in another region, it would be easy to do so. You could choose survey questions that would trigger different responsesfrom your class's to the other that would lead into a good sociology discussion as to why the results may differ. Sociology is such an interesting topic! I bet it's fun to teach.
ReplyDeleteBryan, if anyone can find ways to integrate excel into the classroom, you can! Even a google search for spreadsheet lesson plans in secondary social studies came up with over 69,000 hits!
ReplyDeleteThanks for you ideas- I look forward to your sharing how you use excel when you get to that lesson!
Joan