Week 4-Excel

I am very much in love with excel. I first learned about this program in 8th grade and have been using it religiously since then. It is so easy to input numbers, and just create formulas to get averages and other information about your data. It is an excellent way to keep track of information, and useful for creating graphs and charts.

Excel can be used for anything from grades of students in your classroom, to tracking the amount of time spent practicing your sport of choice. It is so easy and convenient to set up formulas, so all you have to do is just enter your new data in, and the program does the work for you. It even tells you when a formula seems to exclude certain information that might be key. I also love making graphs from data, it is a great visual aid for presentations and you can see clearly the correlations between your different data sets.

Excel sheets are comprised of rows and of columns, where they intersect is called a cell. you can put numerical data or text in these boxes. Formulas can also be written and used to efficiently keep track of averages and such data that requires computation. In my experience the use of formula writing has been very prevalent, I rely on it greatly when working with Excel, and expect I will rely on it more in the future when I am teaching my own class! I can keep track of grades, see the average grade, the lowest grade and the high grade, so I can accurately obtain important information about how well my students are understanding the information I am giving to them. After all, that is the whole point, isn’t it? To cater your teaching skills to what individual children need? Excel would help me greatly in this area.

Week 3-Nets for teachers and Google DOCS

I thought it was very helpful and interesting to read through the standards and see what the responsibilities are for us as teachers. It is extremely important to be professional, be a leader and be creative when working with students. I think this class is good for me because I'm not always as confident as I need to be with technology and I have to be able to show my students I am capable and know what I'm doing in all areas.

I have never used or seen Google Docs before but it seems like it's simple and very easy to work with, especially as you can use it anywhere, with any computer, at any time. It really is a convenient tool to allow people to work together at their own pace. Students would like it because most enjoy working on the computer and would like participating via that medium.Because it requires a password work is safe and secure. It also seems useful that it is in Microsoft Word form so you can add whatever you need to make your work better. It is a wonderful tool for editing group projects and facilitates student completion and teacher viewing of  assignments. I think it is also great because it's better for the environment since there are less copies made and less paper being wasted.

I recently talked with a friend of mine who is teaching a kindergarten class in Hawaii (her 1st job) and she told me that the school is actually using Google Docs as a teacher to teacher tool. They are encouraged to discuss any issues they are having in the classroom and can get feedback from other teachers in the school. Sometimes there isn"t a lot of time for in-depth conversations in the teachers lounge so it lets them communicate ideas, suggestions, and helpful hints to each other while off site.

powerpoints

So, before this class Powerpoints just confused me. There are so many different options for slides, text, animation. Woah, that's just too much to work with! But I've found that once you figure out the most used tools, and what each tool icon stands for, it's not so hard.

There are all kinds of different options for background color or pattern, you can animate your text or even images to make your presentation more visually exciting, and you can present information very easily. As long as you don't write too much. You generally want to use bullets and summarize what you need to say, not write long paragraphs that are hard to read all at once. Keep it short and sweet, that's what I do!

Powerpoints are awesome for presentations or projects in school. you can very easily present your information, AND have a sort of outline for what you want to say. In this way, you can get the information out to your audience and have speaking cues for yourself! I’ve found that to be quite useful because I have horrible memorization skills and that combined with a fear of public speaking made me dread presentations at school. But with powerpoint, you don’t really have to worry about forgetting what you want to say. As long as you are familiar with your topic and have gone over what needs to be said, you can work with the bulleted form that is often used with Powerpoint, to remember what you are trying to get across.

Sometimes teachers overuse the accessories on Powerpoint. Like if you have a really long paragraph and you use the animation that makes the letters fly in one at a time, that is really not going to be useful for your audience and they’re probably just going to be annoyed with you. So you have to be careful and consider your purpose when you use animation. Also with colors, you need to make sure that your text can be easily seen when you change the background colors.

First day of EDUC 286 class!

Welcome to my weekly technology blog! Here I will hopefully be posting about new and exciting technologies that I am learning about in my tech class. Feel free to leave a comment, tell me how I'm doing. I'm looking forward to sharing my experiences with you, it should be fun!