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Thursday, September 6, 2007
Here's a question
After doing those articles on stats for teachers, I've gotten email from several people who have told me they don't know enough about Excel to really use it. So I'm thinking about doing a series of Excel for teachers articles, starting maybe with how to set up and maintain an Excel gradebook. (I'm not really very excited about dealing with all the &^$@#^! screendump graphics, but that's another story.) Do you think this is a good idea, or would I be wasting my time?
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3 comments:
Naturally I think it's a fantastic idea --- I'm desperate for such a course myself.
Also, can you post the link for the articles you already wrote?
I'll post a link to the "Irvington Parents Forum" post I'm going to try to get written sometime today.
Last year the superintendent put out an email promoting the good scores for Trailblazers kids on the 4th grade math test.
This email omitted bad news about the 8th grade ELA scores, which is, in my view, unethical. (I say "unethical" in particular because I was blind-copied on emails from a parent leader to the superintendent asking her to publish statistics to counter the statistics I had published. That's not good. A week or so after that email was sent, voila. An official email from the from the administration filled with all good numbers.)
Two days ago the Daily News published a major story showing that the 4th grade math test for that year was significantly easier than the tests in previous years.
So....I need as much ability to do "Excel statistics" as I can possibly muster.
Spreadsheet programmes are more useful to teach to kids who aren't taking calculus yet, so yes. You don't need a 100 dollar graphing calculator to statistically or algebraically analyse your set of data.
(You probably don't need 300-dollar Microsoft programmes either. Focus on spreadsheet programmes in general -- in particular I think teachers should shy away from focussing on one specific software. Especially since there is open source software such as OpenOffice.
And in fact using a spreadsheet programme is generally much more powerful than your graphing calculator. It's my opinion that graphing calculators should only be used in the classroom from the precalculus level up.
Doing it earlier is just a blatant showoff. "Look we're so advanced! Using these advanced tools!" when the most Integrated Algebra kids are doing to do is enter things in a list and plot a regression line or something (which can be done in spreadsheet programmes).
As I recall, you can even use spreadsheet programmes to calculate derivatives and integrals.
Since you can also plot linear (or even higher degree polynomials!) in Excel (or OpenOffice), and since you can't lose a computer programme so easily, I think this is much better.
Graphing calculators are for exam use and doing things like parametric equations, intersecting a graph, finding a limit or approaching an asymptote at really close zoom, etc.
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