Electronic Spreadsheets, Week 6 Posting

What are the advantages and features of electronic spreadsheets? How do you see them as a benefit in an educational environment?


As a math teacher, I love electronic spreadsheets. I work at a low budget schools, and I am aware that some of the school districts in this area use a program called SAMS or something similar to keep track of student grades. What I use is a spiral notebook and manually pencil in my students’ grades in on a daily basis. Then at the end of the week, I input them into a spreadsheet on my laptop. What a spreadsheet allows me to do is organize the information, compute long complex numerical analysis with just a few clicks of the mouse button. I can alphabetize my students in a few seconds and average their scores in just moments.


Spreadsheets are extremely accurate. If you see that you have made a mistake in your calculations, you just have to go to that row or column where you have mistakenly input the data wrong, and retype it, and the spreadsheet will recalculate the computations for you.


Electronic spreadsheets organize their data into rows and columns. Usually at the top of the column, one types a heading. For me, I would type my students’ names, then the date or assignment. Below, I would then type their names and grades that they earned on their assignments or tests. Then I could use a few clicks of the mouse and use some pre-entered formulas to calculate some essential information.


Let me give you an example of what I can do with a spreadsheet. I can click on an entire row (horizontal) for a student’s grade. At the end, I can click on a summation icon, then find that student’s average so far this term that he is earning. Or I can take a column (vertical) and find an average for an assignment comprised of all the students who did that assignment, all done with a few clicks of a mouse button.


You can also highlight cells and tell the spreadsheet to compute different functions just for the cells that you highlight. For instance, say you want to find little Joey’s average for his first two weeks of school, but you want to put it in a special place on your spreadsheet. You would click on the cell that you would want to send the average to, click on the summation icon, click average, then highlight the grades that you want, then press enter.


Also with an electronic spreadsheet, you can make charts and graphs. This is an excellent way to visually demonstrate the numerical data that you have entered into your spreadsheets. My personal favorite is the bar graphs, because it allows you to compare your students’ grades side by side. There are other types of graphs as well, though. Like I have said, I am partial to the bar graph.


I think the biggest benefit that the spreadsheet has to education, as I have mainly made, is that it is a great way for a teacher to keep track of their students’ grades, especially in a school with low budget (such as mine) that does not participate in SAMS. It saves time rather than having to calculate all the students’ grades by hand.