Week 4 Blog

Tyris Dowell

Blog Posting Week 4

Fall 2010

          Spreadsheets are very useful tools when one is keeping track of data that involves a large amount of numbers.  One way that a teacher could use a spreadsheet is as a gradebook.  It can store the grades, and one can place a formula in a cell to average the grades that have been stored.  I, as a teacher, would probably not use a spreadsheet for this purpose because most schools have electronic gradebooks that basically use a spreadsheet format, but the teacher only has to enter grades and the gradebook program would do all the calculations without having to enter formulas to do the calculations.

          Spreadsheets have a major advantage over calculators because once you set up the spreadsheet and insert the formulas they stay there until they are changed.  For example, if I wanted to use a spreadsheet to keep track of basketball statistics for my team I could set up a row for each game, a column for each free throw made, a column for each free throw attempted, and then have the next column compute the free throw percentage by dividing the first column by the second column and multiplying it by one hundred.  I could also total the column and computer the free throw percentages for the entire season.  With a calculator I would have to re-enter the data each time.  So the spreadsheet would be much more time efficient.

          In the book Meaningful Learning with Technology, it says the three primary functions of a spreadsheet are storing information, calculating information, and presenting information (Jonassen, Howland, Marra, & Crismond, 2008).  I totally agree that a spreadsheet makes doing these three things much easier and can save a tremendous amount of time.  Other than those three things I readlly don’t know of anything else a spreadsheet can do.

References

Jonassen, D., Howland, J., Marra, R.M., & Crismond, D.  (2008).  Meaningful learning with techonology.

          Upper Saddle River, NJ:  Merrill-Prentiss Hall.

Blogging @ School

Tyris Dowell


Using Blogs is something that could be useful if it is done in the right way, but it could also be very damaging to people if they are used incorrectly. Blogs could be useful in education if the teachers are able to maintain tight control and the students do not post things they should not. I could see blogs being a good way for students to keep learning journals. Again if they use them correctly it could help them study for tests, keep track of important events and assignments, and it could help shy students get to know their classmates. If someone asked me if it would be a waste of a student’s time, I would have to say it would depend on the student. The blog would be a tool, just like a notebook or calculator, and if a student used it correctly it could be an asset, but used incorrectly it could just be a high tech way to side-step doing work.

Being a student majoring in kinesiology and planning to teach physical education, I don’t see a lot of use for technology. If a school district had the money I think it would be great to have some interactive games that the students could use such as the Wii Fit system. It would be a fun activity for the students to use sometime. But as I said the school would have to have enough systems so that the kids wouldn’t waste most of the period waiting to have a turn on the Wii. I could see blogs being helpful in academic classes to post and keep notes and journals. But, I also see this as a pitfall for poor students. Unless a school has the means to issue each child a computer and internet access, many children would not get to do the things on the computer outside of school like the more privileged students. That being said I guess it would all depend upon the school district, because some have the money to provide these things while others do not.

Tyris Dowell

What's up class this Tyris. I'm new to this blogging so I will most likely be confused or lost.