There are so many tasks in today’s world that we all have to deal with (getting your groceries, doing your laundry, dealing with the family, juggling work, ect.). When you’re a teacher you may be averaging grades, designing lesson plans, or keeping track of meetings and dates. This is an incredible amount of daily work that a person is asked to balance. If we as educators are living up to the ISTE standard of engaging in professional growth and leadership then we have many tools available to learn and aid us in this chaos. Recently, I have been dealing with the various types of productivity software.
Using basic word processing software to create newsletters and memos, spreadsheets for organizing grades, databases for organizing student data, and presentation and graphic software to make your lecture more interactive and entertaining. This gives us plenty of areas for which we can become more familiar and productive. Any one of these types of software can significantly minimize the amount of time we spend on these tedious tasks. Freeing us to spend more time on the integration of these tools into the students learning. Allowing the students to use these tools to build on their ISTE standard for research and information fluency.
Integrating productivity software will excel anyone’s technical knowledge. Take the Excel program for instance. Learning this will allow you to organize data using functions to add, average, sort, and reference all in an instant. You can even color code it to make it more visually appealing. Trying to accomplish this same task by hand would take days. To me it’s a no brainer on which method is better.
Still many people sequester themselves away from all of these tools that can make them more productive. It could be a fear of the unknown or an unwillingness to change. Even the smallest of steps would help with productivity. Like using the Save As function when word processing to save a document as a template for commonly used material.
I have to admit it takes time and is not always easy. For me to get just the simplest tasks done in excel took some time and a little research. I had to reference the programs help guide, and when I couldn’t find the information I wanted there I went online, searched for tutorials, and googled specific questions that I had. In the long run the time that it took me took look up and educate myself how to accomplish various tasks will be more than made up by the amount of time saved by being more efficient and productive.
resources:
Gunter, G. A., Gunter, R. E., & Shelly, G.B. (2010). Integrating Technology and Digital Media in the Classroom (6th ed.). United States: Course Technology, Cengage Learning.
http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForTeachers/2008Standards/NETS_for_Teachers_2008.htm
http://www.iste.org/Content/NavigationMenu/NETS/ForStudents/2007Standards/NETS_for_Students_2007.htm
I love your take on "the Excel program". I agree with you that it can make life easier. It can also give you headaches when you, or me for that matter, don't know how to use formulas to gather, sort and average information. I had a really hard time with this assignment. In the past, I have not been required to keep grades, I teach Kindergarten. However, if i needed to keep a grade book of sorts, I either did it by hand or used other programs like gradebook pro and progressbook. OCPS currently uses the later of the two. It really makes life easier, but coming form someone with little to no excel experience or training it all looks greek to me.
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