Day+3


 * Day 3: Effective use of Microsoft Office Suite in the classroom **

Obviously, PowerPoint is a good tool for facilitating lectures/lessons and for student projects as well. Not only can it keep a talk on track, but teachers can use the technology to add in images, web links, or links to other documents or slides within the same presentation. Nonlinear presentations would be useful as a student-operated tool (for making up missed classes, maybe?) as a sort of interactive textbook. Teachers can use Excel to make smart grade books for easily tracking data on student progress. I can see that using the data to create graphs could be useful during parent-teacher conferences. Some parents might prefer the basic, "Susie's doing better/worse in Math," but others like to see concrete performance data. The grade book could just track grades, but it could also be used to show information about student performance according to content area, type of assignment, date, or anything else you want to add. Finally, Word is clearly a useful classroom tool. In addition to using it for reports,etc., I also heard from a reliable source that students can create graphic organizers using this tool (and they can save as a web page or pdf).

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