In all my years, I have never had much experience using a spreadsheet and to my amazement it's not so bad. I definitely had to watch a few video tutorials to get a better understanding than what my middle school computer class allowed. I watched the Atomic Learning presentation first and luckily it showed me how organized your spreadsheet file can be. This is good to know because the thought of a spreadsheet, for whatever reason, was intimidating. Possibly my great phobia of numbers. I was happy to also learn in the presentation why the stars can be useful features, as I have always wondered that when sorting my Gmail.
The next relief was discovering the template feature. What I would have done with out this little helper! I couldn't believe the amount of templates to chose! Luckily, there is a students and teachers group. From there, you can chose which template best fits your needs for grading or what have you. I watched several more video tutorials to learn the very basics like moving from cell to cell, creating line breaks, and adding data. A little refresher couldn't hurt. I noticed a link for a Q & A for managing Google docs with your classroom, clicked on it, and found myself lacking the experience to make this info useful. Moving on.....
On to my evaluation of the Elementary lesson plan... I chose the Science subject area which focused on a consumer product testing experiment. I read through the lesson plan and immediately felt a little jealous that Science wasn't this fun when I was in school. Maybe not to all, but the process of the project was creative and sparked my interest. The students were asked to create Google docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms... whoa! whoa! What is a Google form you ask? I did too. I watched the Matt Silverman intro and found out what a convenient little feature this is! Basically an application in which the students are able to enter experiment data, find analysis and all kinds of great info! I don't know about you, but this is my kind of project from start to finish.
Nicely done. It looks like you learned lots! :-)
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