Spreadsheet Opportunities

Using spreadsheets in the classroom may not sound very interesting, but it can be! Spreadsheets are great tools to calculate, compare, and modify data. With the right mix of formulas, and brainstorming you can really find many ways to use them. Spreadsheets are a great tool to use for inquiry based learning. The students won’t be reading out of a text book tediously, they will be able to get their brain going using all the tools that spreadsheets have to offer. They need to experience their own individual knowledge and take it beyond someone else’s words. They will be able to create their own data, and see the different comparisons, and even modify what they want to change. Student can create graphs to show their data, and notice trends in their data. Spreadsheets can really make you think, and enable you to use great tools.

My unit theme is on social behavior, so I have a few ideas how I can use spreadsheets for my unit theme. I could ask the students “to collect data on how they feel each day of the week”. For my movie I had had the children say what color they felt like today, which meant they felt a certain emotion. I could also ask them to “create a graph to show the difference in the days”. I could also ask the students to “create a second graph using new data from a new week”. That way they will have two graphs to compare from. They will visually be able to see the similarities and differences. This may be a little bit challenging for younger children, but once they use it a few times it will get easier. Here is my Google Doc SpreadSheet.

Movie Magic

What an experience! Creating a movie was such a great learning experience for me. I was really hesitant about doing it because I am so intimated by new technology, but luckily it was fairly easy. I had some trouble, but not a whole lot. My movie is really a minute long, but for some reason it shows over 2 minutes. I don’t know why and I haven’t figured out how to fix it, but maybe I will figure it out soon, so just ignore that black space at the end please.

The movie above is formulated from my unit question “How can I express my thoughts and ideas with others? I was given many tools to make the movie happen. Let me tell you about a few of these tools that are available to use. I used Window Movie Maker to make this movie. It was already on my computer, so I just had to click on it to get started. It was fairly easy to import music, images and video onto it. It allows you to add effects, transitions to your movie to add a finishing touch. The effects and transitions really make your movie come alive. I also used FreePlayMusic, which is a tool to access music. They had many songs to pick from and I picked great background music for my movie. This tool is available online and you are able to download the music onto Movie Maker by importing it. Very user friendly! Another tool I used was Audacity, which is a software program for recording and editing sounds. This software lets you edit your sounds they way you want them to sound. There are different versions of this software, so you have a lot to pick from.

This experience taught me a lot. I really enjoyed viewing everyone else's movie. People got really creative. I really liked Sarah's movie because it was so funny. I commented on her movie and gave her some more ideas on what else she can use in the future.I hope to use this technology in my future classroom. I would love to share this with my students because this is something I know they will love. This takes learning to the next level and incorporates so much. I know that new technology is scary, but you will never learn it till you get your feet wet. I have definitely learned that! All of these tools can really bring magic into the classroom. Give it a try!