Good Morning!
One Google Tool that I haven’t incorporated into a Tech Tuesday is Google Sheets. Sheets are basically a spreadsheet like Excel. Many people are intimidated with spreadsheets, but they can be useful tools for many different learning activities! Spreadsheets aren’t just for numbers! Any type of data can be stored and sorted on a spreadsheet, but make sure to separate numerical and text into different cells. And I need to mention - ALL THIS DATA IS SHAREABLE to make it collaborative for students!!!
Here are a few quick examples of how you can use spreadsheets in the different content areas. The sky's the limit on spreadsheets for all subjects!
I have a few examples linked to some of these ideas!
Language Arts
· Students can keep a vocabulary tracking sheet
· Students can keep a reading journal
· Create charts for a research project and insert these charts in their papers.
Science
· Compare physical properties of rocks
· Record ongoing data as plants grow
· Record data on position, velocity, and acceleration and use the data to understand the relationship between them.
Math
· Use spreadsheets to understand the relationships between fractions, decimals, and percents.
· Use spreadsheets to organize data - create graphs and charts
· Teach students to solve word problems using spreadsheets.
Social Studies
· Analyzing data such as population, climate, etc.
· Teachers can create simulations of historical periods. Students use a spreadsheet to record and compute pertinent information. Students can make decisions based on the data and see how these decisions influence other events.
· Compare cultural number systems and compare to our Hindu-Arabic system (Mayan as an example)
Elementary Classrooms - Students can easily create polls or surveys and record and chart the data. Even something as simple as birthdays or eye color and creating a chart with this data and then displaying it as a graph or chart helps students understand these relationships!
Spreadsheets (like I said) can be intimidating to many! However, here is a super tutorial that Alice Keeler (my Google hero) put together to take students or anyone just needing to understand spreadsheets through the basics. I’d recommend just taking 5 - 10 minutes to complete this tutorial. When you click on the link, you’ll be prompted to make your own copy of this sheet. That way, you’ll have it in your drive! Also, here is another website with tips on using spreadsheets!
Next week - FORMS and how to use them. They automatically create a spreadsheet, so check out the tutorial so you can take the data from your form and use it!
And as always, here is a video with some very basic spreadsheet knowledge!
And a bonus: Explore in Google Sheets!