Excel Add-Ons

For the most part, I think that anyone that uses a computer has had some dealings with Excel or another spreadsheet program. Spreadsheets are not hard to create, but if you really want your work load to be completed efficiently, then spreadsheets can be a valuable must-have tool if proper formulas and valid information are present!

For today’s assignment, I had to look at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to compare my home state’s score to the rest of the country. The first thing I had to do was search NCES for the data on the average reading scores for the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the National public. Once I entered the criteria, the data was available in a spreadsheet format.  I then downloaded the information to Excel so that I could work with the data.

The next step was to sort the total scores by lowest to highest. Once this was done, I needed to adjust the options of this spreadsheet to include an add-on called Analysis ToolPak so I could analyze the scores. It was pretty easy to add ToolPak as an add-on and once I did, I used it to create a Total Scores Descriptive Statistics spreadsheet. The data in this spreadsheet showed the overall average, mode, median, standard deviation, skewness and other information relevant when looking at the data as a whole. This is where the information became interesting and for me somewhat dismal. Interesting because it showed how states compared to each other in reading and dismal because I realized that WV is not doing so well! West Virginia is number 10 on the list which is below average. There are 9 below WV and 43 above WV, so you can see why my reaction was disappointment.

To see the information in graph form, I created a scatter plot chart to show the severity of my state’s position compared to others. The scatter plot can be viewed at Average Reading Scores.  By looking at the scatter plot, I think a person can really see the results and relate to the urgency of the need for education reform in reading!

 

Since this activity dealt with manipulating a data set to use as a comparison for the average reading score of the 50 states, D.C. and the national public, it complies with the ISTE.NETS.T standard number two, Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. I think this standard applies to this activity because the teacher can use Excel to help students look at data and manipulate it in a spreadsheet in order to utilize it. Just having the numbers in a spreadsheet is not enough. The teacher can show the students how to use formulas and add-ons in spreadsheets to compare, combine, and examine information more effectively.

Google Sites

In today’s age, having a website and providing information to the public is pretty common. For whatever reason someone wants to share information, it is pretty easy to design something that is user friendly, private, public, informative, educational, directional and even conversational much like this blog. So today I created a website for myself and it was extremely easy using Google Sites.

I logged into my Google mail account and then just clicked on the Sites button at the top of the page.  Once in the Sites section, I was able to click on Create a site and off I went! The setup was pretty straight forward and I even found a template that was simple and represented my future profession as a teacher.  The graphics on the page reminded me of Schoolhouse Rock and I love it!

After I setup the template, I had to add some pages and links to the documents I’ve created in my technology course. This was kind of tricky because I added some things in the wrong order, but was able to edit them in the layout section in the drop down box labeled “More” and everything ended up in the order I wanted it. The other thing I had issues with was the uploading. I forgot that even though there is an “add files” button at the bottom of each page, you still have to be in edit mode in order to upload anything. Once I figured that out, I was able to upload my resume and my rubric from last week.

It is definitely a work in progress, but for not having a classroom yet, I think I did okay. Click here to preview Mrs. Heflebower's Class website.

Since a personal website can be useful for anyone, this activity would be a great learning tool for students to learn about creating a website of their own where they have to edit, choose the content and topic, theme and layout appropriately.  This activity complies with the ISTE.NETS.T standards one, two and four. Standard one facilitates learning and creativity in which this activity completely encompasses. For standard two, the design and development of the website helps the students experience learning through digital media while they create a well-thought website to present to the public. The final standard number four promotes and models digital citizenship and responsibility. With this activity, students will learn about the appropriateness of content and language use within their personal website.

I think having a website is great, but I can already see how it is a lot of work to maintain to keep it interesting! I have my work cut out for me when I become a teacher!

Rubrics

Since returning to college a couple of years ago, I’ve noticed that Rubrics have become a new way of grading different assignments. This was a new thing to me considering I was used to just getting a letter grade for all of my assignments. I now realize that Rubrics are helpful and provide a guide for students to complete the assignments and set criteria for teachers to grade those assignments. Rubrics are especially good for projects, papers, presentations or experiments. 

I think the best way to make a Rubric is to know what you want students to get out of the assignment first. Once you know what the goal is for the end result in learning, then creating the Rubric is easier.  When creating the Rubric, the teacher can use criteria such as resources, semantics, organization of the material, graphic organizers, images, timeliness and many other requirements that a student might need to include in a project, paper, presentation or experiment. Each one of these set criteria is given a point value and the teacher gives points based on the student’s end product. Basically if the student did everything in the assignment that was required, then the teacher gives the maximum amount of points. If the student was lacking in some areas, the teacher gives the student the appropriate points based on the Rubric.

The one thing I like about the Rubric is the guidelines. When a Rubric is involved, there is no question as to what the teacher expects the student to do. If the student wants a perfect score, then the student has to complete all of the requirements in the highest point value column. Grades no longer become subjective to teacher bias or poorly stated expectations.

To share a Rubric, a teacher can use Rubistar to create and save Rubrics that apply to their classroom. I like Rubistar because there are templates on the website that can be altered to fit the assignment and you don’t have to reinvent the “Rubric” wheel. The Rubric I created has to do with a Social Studies report on the Battle of Antietam. Teachers can also share the Rubrics with the class and the parents of the students. By communicating with the students and parents, the teacher expresses her/his expectations about the assignment and there should be no questions about what is expected.

The activity of creating a Rubric online complies with the ISTE.NETS.T standard number 3, Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. The idea of putting expectations and guidelines into a Rubric form demonstrates the teacher’s use of digital technology in order to convey assignment details to the student. When teacher use sites like Rubistar, the teacher is showing the students different ways to grade work that is nontraditional, but beneficial to the student. Rubrics are important in student learning when it comes to following directions, setting goals and meeting expectations.

Self Grading Form

The act of creating a form in Google Drive is pretty cool as I demonstrated in a previous activity. The next step is to create a form (maybe a quiz or test or survey) and then grade the form using the Self Grading spreadsheet option within Google Drive. At first I thought this activity would be easy, but the hardest part was creating good questions that could be graded using a simple Self Grading form.

The first thing I did was create a quiz about rocks. There were 8 multiple-choice questions to answer.  Somehow on my summary spreadsheet there ended up being 9 questions with one column left blank. To fix this problem I put in N/A as the answer and filled in the answer for everyone so that all could get credit. Click here to see my Rock Quiz

After the quiz was sent out to my participants, I needed to create an answer key for the quiz. When I submitted the correct answers by taking the quiz myself, I could then put the formula together in order to mark the participant’s answers right or wrong. The formula part of the form was fairly easy after I watched the YouTube how-to video. I really like creating spreadsheets with short cuts and formulas because it makes things easier if they are automated from the start. Once the participants started answering the quiz questions, I was able to see if my formulas were done correctly. How cool to see the results of the quiz without having to manually grade anything. Click here to see the Grading Results Spreadsheet.

I think this Self Graded Form enables teachers to utilize digital media in a way that not only makes things straightforward, but easy to grade and record. When teachers can give quizzes like this one, students are able to quickly answer the questions and teachers are able to grade the form without spending a great deal of time outside of class. This particular activity complies with the ISTE.NETS.T standard number two, Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments. The activity provides an example of how teachers can use digital media to assess learning through other measures than the traditional pencil and paper test.

Google Forms

So I am no expert in creating surveys, but after completing today’s activity in Google Forms, I could surely put something together to use as a teacher. In Google Forms (under Google Drive), there are questions that can be used to create a form and they come in various formats. The form was easy to create and I especially like that you can put a theme to it when it is presented. My form was about recess and physical activity, so it was fitting that I found a theme with runners as the graphic.

 As for the questions, it was slightly difficult to figure out what types of questions I wanted to use with the different formats. I really liked most of the question types and it was cool coming up with different ways to have the participant answer the question. Choosing the verbiage was also a little difficult because I had to think about whether or not the question was relevant and whether the wording was understandable.

To check out my final survey form, go to my School Recess questionnaire.  Click here if you want to see the Form Results from the participants. I think as a teacher these types of forms will be helpful in collecting information that can be useful for helping students, communicating with parents and getting feedback from parents about their child’s needs. These forms can be created to compile yes/no answers, constructed feedback and all sorts of data that can be helpful in making the classroom a better learning environment.

In order for this form to be used, a teacher must gather email addresses of parents and students so that they can participate in answering the questionnaires.  If a parent does not have an email address, the teacher might be able to administer the form via paper copy directly to the parent.  The document can also be shared, so anyone could have access to it. One of the problems I had was enabling a non-Shenandoah student access to the form. After clicking off of the requirement for a participant to sign in to Shenandoah’s email system, my participants were able to answer the questions in the form.

 

Just as parents may use this form, so can students. A teacher might use the form to poll the students about an upcoming test or to see what they know about a topic. These forms can be used for endless gathering of data for many topics. Because the form answers transfer into a spreadsheet, the results are easily viewed and can be interpreted in order to help the teacher prepare for future lesson planning and teaching.

Overall, this activity using Google Forms was pretty neat. I like having access to tools that can be manipulated to work for multiple purposes and subjects. The activity complies with ISTE.NETS.T standard number two, Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments. Since the activity was creating a form that could be used to assess a student by asking questions and then interpreting that data from the spreadsheet, it complies with giving different types of assessments through digital media. By using such forms, the teaching is demonstrating new ways to assess the student and also shows the student ways to use the form as well for other measurements.

Prezi

Today’s activity was creating a Prezi presentation with lots of images, simple words and a layered pattern for easy viewing.  This is not my first Prezi, but since the program is still new to me I had a lot of fun putting this lesson together! The first Prezi I completed really didn’t have too much layering within the slides and I kept it simple while using short word phrases and one image per circle. This time I explored my options and added some circles within circles for a clean and less dizziness look while the slides are in play.  The program is pretty easy to use, I learned best by playing around with options and clicking different formats to better understand what the program is capable of in terms of presentations.

The presentation I put together this time was about synonyms, antonyms and homonyms. My presentation can be viewed at Word Relationships on Prezi.com

After completing this Prezi, I realize how valuable slide shows can be, especially if the person creating the presentation takes time to be inventive and daring when putting the information together within each slide. Prezi is definitely more interesting than PowerPoint, although I know that PowerPoint has quite a few options that are unique to its program. The Prezi is different from PowerPoint because it can move around the screen and allows the creator to combine information into one circle or shape to keep it together as one thought. The Prezi also allows the creator to link slide to slide or shape to shape instead of putting the slides in order as PowerPoint does. The way that Prezi is laid out gives the presenter the ability to move back and forth between slides in order to show relationships or review the previous information. In PowerPoint, the layout doesn’t allow the presenter to go back and review unless the slide show returns to the beginning. The big thing I like about Prezi is that is changes up the boring old bulleted slide and makes presentations a fun and creative way to express a story or lesson.

This activity complies with the ISTE.NETS.T standards one, two and three. For standard one, the Prezi allows creativity on the part of the teacher to engage students in learning about word relationships through a unique presentation that covers all of the lesson objectives. The presentation also complies with standard two which states that teachers should design learning resources that are different from regular classroom tools in order to demonstrate the use of digital technology.  The final standard to be associated with this activity is standard three. By using the Prezi, the teacher is able to model such a presentation for the students and teach them the ways to use this digital media for learning.

Word Relationships on Prezi

Photo Story

This activity involved creating a video from a slide presentation using a program called Photo Story for Windows.  Let’s back up a minute. Before I could use Photo Story, I had to create a PowerPoint presentation in order to use the slides as pictures for this narrative video.  The presentation I created is called “Canning Tomatoes”. So naturally, the video is about canning home grown tomatoes.

After I created the slides, I downloaded Photo Story and began my journey as the director, editor and creator of a video about canning tomatoes. Photo Story was extremely easy to use. I was able to upload my slides right into the program and started to add voice and other formatting like duration of time the slide was seen by the viewer. What I really liked about this program was that I could type in notes into a box and use those as a guide for my speaking parts. It was like a small cheat window in case you didn’t quite know what to say when creating the audio for a particular slide. I also liked the fact that each slide had its individual recording as opposed to the recordings that are continuous and if you make a mistake you have to start over. I only had to redo a couple of slides when I was editing my work.

Next I had to save the video and upload it to YouTube. It was kind of scary to think that I would have something on YouTube that anyone could see. I went ahead and logged in with my student id (which is linked to YouTube) and successfully uploaded my video to anyone interested in canning tomatoes. The video can be seen at Canning Tomatoes via YouTube  

I really enjoyed creating this video about canning tomatoes. This activity complies with the ISTE.NETS.T standard number 3, Model Digital-Age Work and Learning. Since this activity communicates relevant information and ideas to others, this is a prime example of digital-age work and learning. I think this type of activity would be good for anyone to practice articulation, giving directions, creating narratives and even just sharing what they know.