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.