Using Spreadsheets in the Classroom

Spreadsheets are a very useful tool that can greatly enhance students learning both visually and mentally. You can use spreadsheets in many different ways, whether you yourself are using them to keep track of your students’ grades or by having the students create their own spreadsheet.

With my unit plan, spreadsheets are not going to be that easy to incorporate into my lesson plans. Why is writing important?, is my main unit question and I could only come up with a few ways for my students to use spreadsheets and incorporate this question:

How many of each of the following different types of papers have you written?

After reading your peers paper, rate them on how they did in each of the following categories.

I really like this last question because it allows the students to experience peer review and get the feeling for it. It also allows them to communicate with their peers and get feedback on their papers.

Below is a link to a spreadsheet that I created using a wedding budget and it just gives a little insight to what I might have my students do in their projects.

My spreadsheet

Creative Writing

I really enjoyed doing this assignment because I learned a great new tool to use and plan on utilizing it in the future. Movie Maker is a great way to imbed your thoughts and learning processes into something that the students will not only enjoy but take something from. I used a lot of different techniques in my project and explored even more. I really like the fact that they have so many choices for your effects and transitions. I wasn’t exactly sure how to embed them into my video but I found a great website that explained in great detail exactly to use Movie Maker and everything that it offered. I had always heard about imbedding music to your videos and title overlay but I had never explored it or been given the opportunity to explore it.

Title overlay is a great way to incorporate words into your videos without using voice threads or a different type of voice narration. I also liked that they had a tab that would create a credits slide for you and all you had to do was type in the words; it even shows it like you would see credits at the end of big time movies. You can also change the length of each slide/shot and adjust your music accordingly and at the end if the song is longer than the video, you can have it fade out at a certain point instead of it just cutting off when the movie is over. In the end, I think someone could learn a lot using Movie Maker and I'm sure there are many more options that I didn't even come across that would be amazing in constructing a video. Here is the link to the website that was a huge help in teaching me how to use Movie Maker.
-Movie Maker