Excel - A great Classroom Tool

There are many reasons to use Excel in the classroom. No matter what subject content you are teaching, Excel can make it instantly more visually understood by putting the data in chart/graph form. This also makes the data easier to understand. Students don't have to get bogged down in the actual plotting of the data on a graph (as we used to), but can spend more time analyzing the information presented to them quickly and efficiently by Excel. I do think that in the early grades that students should go through the actual "hand" plotting of their graphs when first learning the basics of graphing. It is important to get students familiar with Excel. School districts should make an effort to have the most up to date version for their students, so that they can go smoothly from the secondary classroom to college or the workplace.

Some examples of how students could use Excel in my classroom are listed below:

• Lets chart the effects of earthquakes on buildings. Over the past decade earthquakes have increased and are affecting the world population. It is current events and this is a lesson that could be coordinated between the Science, Social Studies, and the English departments of our school. I think projects like this have a much bigger impact on the students than just each class studying separate topics all the time.
  

• Lets create a Timeline. This could be for an experiment, to compare several experiments or to show the history of famous scientific experiments.

• Lets help the environment. We will track and chart our family's water usage on a weekend day when everyone is home. We will all compare our family's water usage and come up with three ways each family can conserve (I would get parental approval). We could take it one step further and plot the most common ways that all the students feel that they can improve the water usage.

• Lets see where solar energy works best. We will plot the annual daylight patterns for our area, the equator and the arctic. By doing this exercise they will also see how the earth's rotation affects the amount of daylight over the course of a year.

• Lets find out the acid rain levels in our state. We are going to research the pH levels, use Excel to make a graph. We will also look into the causes and possible solutions to this problem. This lesson would also be a good one to coordinate with the Social Studies and English departments.
  

• Lets look at this chart and work backwards. We are going to reconstruct the original study from the data represented on the chart. What was the reason this chart was made?
  

There are endless ways to incorporate Excel into the students daily activities associated with the current lesson plan. It helps students look at information in an analytical way. In an instant they can see the comparison and relationship between multiple sets of data. They can pick which type of graph or chart they feel best represents their data. Excel does help students visualize and interpret data.