Some Ideas of using Excel in the classroom

Excel is such a versatile and useful program not just for businesses and school administration, but also for classroom use. Teaching students how to use many of its features and utilities is an opportunity to teach the Net-genders something new for them, thus have them more interested in our classes. Here are some ideas of how to incorporate Excel in our curriculum.

·        We can use Excel to create a spreadsheet of vocabulary entries in English and their correspondent in a foreign language, as one of the final assignments after reading a small book in that foreign language, making it easier to organize it alphabetically.

·        We could also use Excel to collect and organize data of a poll for the school board of students’ election, and use these data to a math class in which percentage would be taught.

·        Excel would be useful for student’s groups keep track of their fund raisings, giving them also the opportunity to present their data in charts, and the data could be used by teachers to teach math or the value of money.

·        Music teachers could use Excel to make students complete pre made charts with the notes

and their values, as an reinforcement activity.

• Teachers could use Excel spreadsheet to make children think about logic, using the feature of “recognizing your analogy”, as for example when you write some months or numbers. Teacher could ask students to explain the logic recognized by Excel, or could ask the students to foresee the logic it would use next.

There are so many ways we could use Excel in our curriculum, those are just some simple, not very time-consuming examples of it. Giving it a try, we could see how useful and fun it is to use it with students.