Excel

While I find Excel to be a great tool, it can also be very overwhelming. It offers so many services that in navigating through the program, it can be easy to get lost.

When teaching Excel in the classroom, I think it is very important to highlight the formulas and functions that are most commonly used and focus intently on those few items. Overkilling a few functions would be better than to brief a mass amount of functions. Students would only get confused and be unable to remember anything. In my computer experience, I have been taught Excel many, many times. Each time, my professors briefed a whole lot of different formulas and functions that Excel is capable of- as a result, the only thing I know how to use is AutoSum. I feel that if my teachers had spent more time of a select few and important functions, I would be a more proficient Excel user.

In elementary school, the basic functions are the most practical tools to be taught anyway. AutoSum is great for totaling numbers for any class- recorded times for a science experiment, gathered statistics for a math class- the opportunities are endless. Another Excel resource that is great in the classroom is the graph maker.