Skills Update A - My Plan

 Skills Update A – Spreadsheet Skills

I have altered my final project for the spreadsheet skills.  My original boot camp technology paper suggests that I will create a spreadsheet using parents’ names and address of a class.  Upon doing some research to get started in Excel skills, I found a list for uses of spreadsheets in the elementary classroom.  I decided that creating spreadsheets with both charts and graphs could really benefit them in the area of word problems.  So, I decided to practice my skills by creating 2 examples of data in both chart and graph form to use in a classroom.  I would even take this a step further as the year progressed and let the students learn more about spreadsheets by creating a word problem set of their own for students to use.

How it would work:

I would display the information in both chart and graph form for the class to see – maybe on a SMARTboard.  Then, there would be a question for them to answer each morning of the week.  I would have them write and explain their answers in a math journal.  I would even have a small copy of the data displayed for them to cut and paste into their math journals.  Then, each week the display would change.  This constant exposure to charts and graphs would be a wonderful tool for them to master.  

Skills:

I feel pretty successful that I have read, watched and learned about relative and absolute references, formulas and functions, fill down, fill series, create charts, edit charts and insert into Word document.  I found that some of these operations I did know how to do, I just didn't realize what they were called until I was studying this.