Journal+Entry+3

Even if they had no other value, using Microsoft Office applications in the classroom would benefit students because they may need to use these applications in the "real world," and what's the point of education if not to prepare students to function outside of academia. However, every Office application has some other benefit to students.

Word: If nothing else, Word gives students experience typing and allows them to enter content electronically so that the content can be shared with others. Word can also help students who have handwriting difficulties to write or students with dyslexia to avoid spelling problems. Word can also allow students to edit their work more easily, and some function or another on there allows you to go in and edit and make comments on word documents off to the side.

Powerpoint: Powerpoint has benefits for both students and teachers. I am primarily interested in working with younger students, third or fourth grade. I might ask these students to work in pairs to prepare one Powerpoint slide that summarizes an entire story, helping students to work on their summarization skills since they are limited in space. Or I might ask students to give a very brief speech on a topic and let them use a short Powerpoint presentation as a way to help them remember what to say. I might also use Powerpoints to present material to the class. Powerpoints can contain videos, graphics, etc that I might want to use in a lesson in one spot so I don't have to search around.

Excel: With younger children, I think Excel has fairly limited applications, but I might teach my students to use this application for some sort of data collection. For example, in science we might study the growth of plants, and I could have students log the height of different plants on different days, etc. We might work on some simple math formulas, like adding up data or creating averages. I might even teach students how to make a simple graph based on data for a project.

The end.

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