Week 4

Excel has many uses applicable to the classroom environment and is infinitely customizable for teachers. These are just a few of the ways that Excel can help educators.

1. Excel can be use to track student disciplinary matters. Given a scoring method for the severity of infractions, Excel can be used as a means of identifying trends when concerned with large amounts of students. This information can then be used to help determine whether action needs to be taken and can serve as a secondary source of documentation, which is of the utmost importance when dealing with disciplinary matters. In this application, Excel can also provide a means of determining whether any action taken to address an issue has been successful and to what extent.

2. A similar scoring method can also be used for teachers to track their own experiences with lesson plans. In this way, lesson plans can be ordered according to their effectiveness, richness of content, applicability and their degree of necessary revision. This would be an invaluable for an educator in the first year of a grade-level of subject area. In just a few minutes, that teacher would be able to retrieve data on an entire year’s worth of lesson plans and determine what plans worked, what didn’t and what might be revised into a more successful plan.

3. What might be the most obvious application of Excel in the classroom would be attendance, which could be sent electronically at the beginning of the day, or even each class, to the school’s administration. Additionally, students with attendance concerns could easily be targeted for action since records could be called upon almost instantaneously.

4. With regard to language arts, Excel could be used to track student progress with independent reading. Currently, students conference with teachers once a week to report their progress. The information gleaned from these conferences is typically recorded on paper in a binder. However, this information could be stored in an Excel file in a matter that could easily be read rather than as handwritten records, posssibly written by othe individuals, that might be difficult to read.

5. And finally, many students are now tapped to attend extracurriculr activities during the regular class day. Many of those students may be missing out on valuable classroom instruction by attending too many activities, or by attending them too often. By keeping track of the time spent in these activities, teachers could later pull up a report of several days or weeks of information and see whether a student’s extracurricular participation is cutting too far into classroom attendance without having to keep mental track of the matter.

While Google Docs does not have as many features for word processing and spreadsheets as Microsoft Word and Excel, many of the most valuable tools are still featured. Additionally, Google Docs provides another element that makes it far superior to the Microsoft alternative; it’s online.

Documents saved in Google Docs are accessable by anyone chosen by the user that created the document. Because of this, Google Docs is an open repository for collaboration between fellow teachers, departments, administrators, etc. Conversely, documents saved in Google Docs do not have to be made public to anyone and can stay without a single user’s account.

Additionally, Google Docs is accessable from any location with an Internet connection and information stored in Google Docs is saved offsite and backed up. Because of these simple features, Google Docs should be the preferred alternative.