Spreadsheets

I think spreadsheets are a wonderful tool that allows us to create tables, timelines, keep records, and many other things. I believe it has many uses in a classroom. It could be used to show students how to organize their data in a clean manner. It also allows them to be creative and use some of the tools to personalize it.

As a teacher i believe that it would be a useful gradebook or even a absence report. I believe that the advantages of using a spreadsheet over a calculator would be the fact that you can change the data in a spreadsheet as much as you want and the formulas would stay the same. This allows us to go back and make changes if needed to see a new outcome. A good example would be a student has a C and wants to know if extra credit will help him or her get a B. You could factor in a extra credit grade to see if it would help them out or not. I think a fourth function would be a organizer. Spread sheets allow us to keep the data in a very organized manner that way if we need it we can pull it up and use it in a formula or what ever else may be needed.