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Excel In the Classroom

What's Good About It?

1. Using Excel can enhance understanding of content within a grahic presentation of the information; it provides a visual representation of data that makes it easier to analyze.
2. Excel reduces the difficulty of plotting data and allows students a means for interpreting the data.
3. You can also reverse the traditional process of analyzing data by giving students a completed chart and see if they can reconstruct the underlying worksheet. This goes a long way toward helping them understand the relationship between the data and the chart.
4. Excel can easily convert any chart or data set into a web page, making it very easy to share information among groups. Many universities are using this model for data sharing between students who aren't even on the same continent.
5. Excel's ability to dynamically generate charts and graphs in seconds makes it easy to quickly demonstrate relationships between numbers.
6. As a teaching tool, students can see how different types of graphs and charts can be used to represent the same series of data. As one teacher stated, "For years it took me three to five days to teach kids the use a pie chart, bar graph, and/or a line graph to accurately represent information. Now with Excel, it makes it so much easier because the kids are far more motivated to use the application to manipulate data and to chart any information."
7. One of the best things is that you can compare data between any two or more variables. Using storage devices (disks), you can store data and use it to conduct a comparative analysis of any information that you have collected over time. For example, you can compare data collected by a group of collaborating teachers within one school, one county, or around the world.

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