Spreadsheets and the Classroom

This week for CEDO 515, we were working with spreadsheets.  Spreadsheets were some of the first "killer apps" after the personal computer came to market and made a place for the IBM PC in the business world.  There are many different versions of spreadsheet software or online spreadsheet apps that are available for use.  Even though there are many versions, they all serve the same general function.  They are able to hold, sort and modify data that is stored in them. One thing that is nice is that you are able to create specific cells that rely on the data from another cell or multiple other cells and a function to calculate the data in the cell.  Our class, one of the exercises we needed to attempt was to use a spreadsheet to create a modifiable recipe.  The recipe that I used was from the Betty Crocker website for a Lemon Meringue Pie.  The only problem that I could see with using this recipe and modifying it would be that if you use # of servings that is not a multiple of 8, you would need to make individual sized pies.

One of the reasons I would use spreadsheets in my 7th Grade Science classroom, would be to have my students organize and analyze the data that they collect from doing their science projects.  One one of my favorite websites for my class is called Sciencebuddies.orghttp://www.sciencebuddies.org/.  On this site, there is a page that explicitly shows how to not only use spreadsheets (specifically Excel) to organize the experimental data, but to able to be able to create a graph that will allow the viewer of the experimental end-product to easily understand the relationship between the control data and the experimental data.  The specific page with this info for using spreadsheets in the context of science is here.