I've been exposed to and expected to use Excel any number of times in various school and work-related scenarios over the past twelve years. Each experience, upon reflection, seems tedious, difficult, and inefficient. To put it simply, I abhor Excel.
I understand the basic functions of the program and admit that my past frustration probably limits my willingness to give it another try. So my introduction to Google's Spreadsheet comes with a bit of baggage. The format looks painfully similar to Excel. After flipping through the presentation on it and checking out the program first hand, certain processes came back from memory. I played around with some of the various functions like sum, average, and count and admit that this program would serve a teacher well. Spreadsheet would certainly help organize large quantities of information as it pertains to individual students and their grades. However, I think my attitude toward these types of programs dictates my level of interest and general apprehension.
One lesson plan that I looked at utilized Spreadsheet to graph and interpret data from a science project. The use of the chart would help the students to graph their findings. The graph would be an excellent way for students to have visual representations of raw data from their experiment. This would be extremely helpful for students who are visual learners to see past raw figures and be able to more easily draw conclusions from the experiment. Admittedly, Spreadsheet would be an excellent resource for a class to collaborate and contribute data from multiple sources. They could also work on the project from home. Unfortunately, their teacher would be responsible for clearly and patiently explaining how Spreadsheet works. This would be one of the biggest obstacles for me to overcome.
Fair enough. I am glad that you looked at Google Spreadsheet. At a minimum, it might help that it is free, so that if you need a spreadsheet you won't have to pay a lot of money for something you do not like.
ReplyDeleteOh, and you might find a spreadsheet useful to keep a grade sheet -- just saying...
Nice write up. Thanks! :-)