EXCEL Project

Project Name

How We Spend Our Day

Description of Learning Goals and Standards

This project ties in nicely with the “Create a Newspaper” Lesson Plan. As one of their news articles, students will interview students concerning one particular topic (How we spend our day), collect and analyze data, and extract statistical data using the Excel software program. This lesson helps students with their analytical skills, communication and writing skills as well as strengthening their technological abilities. It is important that students be able to integrate several skills into one larger project. They will need to be proficient in this in increasingly more difficult projects as they progress through high school, college and the work world.
The Standards met for this project are:
· 5—Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
· 6—Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
· 8—Students use a variety of technological and information resources (libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
· 11—Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
· 13—Students use basic research techniques with teacher guidance.

Rationale for Technology

Conducting interviews and then analyzing one’s data is an excellent way for students to learn to gather information and pull it together into a report that correctly communicates this data. The EXCEL spreadsheet helps them organize the data in a logical manner and the graphs that are produced helps the students visualize the results. They should be able to use the program to determine if their data is correct and if results make sense.
EXCEL also allows them to check their math computations for accuracy which is great reinforcement.

Description of Lesson Implementation

The “reporters” are given Interview sheets that are used to question their fellow classmates on a given topic. The information is entered into the Excel program. Students must understand how to enter formulas and how to arrange data so that the answers are relevant to their question. Students manually calculate the averages and then use Excel to check their answers. Charts are produced that visualize the results. A news article is written concerning this analytical interview and the charts are entered alongside the article in the newspaper.

Assessment

Again, I am finding this lesson plan extremely useful across the curriculum. Students work on writing skills with their article, technology skills using Excel, math skills calculating the averages et al, and thinking skills when they determine whether their spreadsheet conveys the data correctly.

Other Places to Use this Solution

EXCELcan be used in every subject area and inside and outside of the classroom. It is a great tool for organizing data. The charts provide a quick study of data that can be helpful in the classroom, PTA, home budgets, work presentations—anywhere that a lot of data needs to be synthesized.

What I Learned and What I Would Improve on Next Time

I did learn to KISS. My first EXCEL project was based on an intermediate project in the EXCEL kit. Halfway through I realized that generating the formulas using EXCELwas beyond my immediate knowledge and I had to start over with a simpler project for my first try. This reinforced the need to keep my projects simple the first time I try this with students. What works manually mathematically may become frustrating for a student trying to integrate the technology and math skills together into a project. Becoming bogged down in a multilevel math formula defeats the lessons that can be learned by this project.

References

Excel spreadsheet
Excel Kit Interview Worksheets
Georgia QCCs