Week 4: Excel Reflection

5 ways to incorporate Excel into the curriculum into your school. 
1.  Excel could be used in language arts class as a prompt to telling a story.  Charts, graphs, and data all tell a story, you could ask students to write a story based on data on a chart or analyze a pie graph, telling a story from what they see, kind of like a wordless book. 
2.  While observing in a 5th grade classroom, the teacher shared with me the concern his students had regarding their time limitations specifically, they did not think they had enough time to read all the pages that were required of them.  Students could use Excel to track how many minutes they spend doing x,y & z (predetermined activities for each child) through out their day.  They could take the math farther and see how many minutes they read, how many minutes it takes to read a page, and then realize they can accomplish the reading requirements of 5th grade.  By creating a pie chart, students may realize some time management opportunities that they did not know existed for other activities as well. 
3.  Excel could be used for streamlining or analyzing classroom housekeeping/management.  (For example: the teacher could get to know his/her students literary preferences more by collecting data on their book selections from the classroom library, or perhaps assign duties to the "job squad" aka classroom helpers)
4.  An Excel spreadsheet could have color coded columns and could be set up as a homework planner sheet for students to refer to and for the teacher to enter info on.  This could be posted on the classroom web site for parents to also refer to.
5.  Students could enter data from inquiry investigations in science class into a spreadsheet and then graph their data to make connections.  For example, if students were studying evaporation, they would record temperature and liquid level and plot it on a chart.   Does temperature affect the level of the water?  What evidence do you have to support this?