Week 2

This website directly from Microsoft actually provides some ideas for lesson plans using different software. Some of them use excel and I thought it was very interesting because the ideas give you everything you would need for your lesson including objectives, learning outcomes, lesson procedure, and a conclusion.  

Here is a link to the website:

www.microsoft.com/education/en-us/teachers/plans

One thing that I thought was very interesting about database usage was the idea that “excel can easily make your spreadsheets into web pages.”  While I often think with an elementary school mind because that’s the type of school I’m currently working in, I think it would be great to utilize this for high schoolers.  High schoolers could learn to create their own web pages and insert charts and graphs straight to these websites.  Doing this would be extremely career oriented. Students could learn to carry this over to their jobs whether it be sharing numbers online for a sales department or sharing a presentation in the entertainment  field on Billboard hits. Not only could this prepare students for a career, it could also prepare them for college. The article states that “many university students use this feature of excel to share projects with other students.” It would be really neat if that could be a skill they could learn in high school.

Link to source:

www.teach-nology.com/tutorials/excel

Teaching scripted programs in special education hasn’t really given me much opportunity to use spreadsheets or databases with students.  In the past, I have use Excel in several of my careers. This would mostly be for databases with phone numbers, addresses, etc. As a teacher, I have really only used Excel to create a sign-out sheet for our i-pod touches. This is my first year though. As a student in high school I was taught to use Excel. I was one of not many students who were taught to use the program though, because I was taking a business-oriented class. The class gave me a lot of data to enter and then would give me instructions on how to create bar graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, and more. I found making these interesting and kind of fun, and I never realized how much I would use it once I got into college and into my first job as an administrative assistant.

Although I have never used Excel as a teacher before, I think it is definitely something that should be incorporated in the classroom. Kids can always benefit from using new technologies, especially ones that are widely used in the business world. By reviewing the Microsoft website I posted earlier and thinking about some of the math classes I collaborate with, I am starting to get some ideas about how I can use Excel more in the future.

Week 1

The first week of class in education technology presented a lot of new information.  I previously saw technology in the classroom as something that the students enjoyed and am ashamed to say that I mainly thought of it as just entertainment or a reward for students. After the readings and videos I have discovered that technology in the classroom is so much more. Although, I feel like they have benefited from a lot of the technology in the classroom, one thing I realized I needed to work on was monitoring students to see if what I am doing is actually helping or if I should change it up.

Recently, we have started playing a game with “sight words” which some of our students have been struggling with. To do this we use the mobi device which always me to write sight words up on the screen while still walking around the classroom. I also allow students to write on the mobi so that they can work on spelling these words. In order to monitor this technology I will begin to list our sight words in a database. During the games I can keep track of who got which “sight word” correct whether it be recognizing the word or spelling it. By doing this I can see if the game is actually helping the children learn more of their words or if I need to try a new approach.  Creating a database of sight words would be the first step and then making sure to monitor each student carefully during the game to determine which words they got correct.

The toughest part about doing this would be the lack of time. I am currently a paraeducator and do not really have a lot of spare time. I am either collaborating with other teachers or teaching intervention courses.  Paraeducators do not really get any sort of plan time so creating the database and continuing to update it weekly would be a large task. Another big task would be ensuring that we have the time to do it weekly in the classroom since we are only with these students for thirty minutes.

To overcome these issues, I could always come to school early and work on them. Another thing I could do is simply to have the spreadsheet pulled up while we are working on the sight words and update it immediately. Although, we do not have a laptop, our computers are not too far away from the learning space. As far as making time in the lessons, this might be harder. We can never exactly know what might change as far as scheduling during any given week. I think it would just be important to try and get the sight words read as much as possible. Even if it wasn’t every single week, doing it as much as possible would still give me an idea if the game is effective or not.