Social Bookmarking/Excel Ideas

Social bookmarking can be extremely helpful to both students and teachers. Teachers can use social bookmarks to organize readings for students by creating different lists. This would allow students to retrieve their assignments in an organized fashion. Teachers could also use their social bookmarks to help other teachers. Social bookmarks allow people to share their links which helps share ideas. Teachers can have students create different social bookmarks depending on the unit they are learning in class. This would be an interesting way to gather classroom resources.

Social bookmarking will help me organize the sites that I visit frequently. It will also allow me to find new sites regarding teaching and the English curriculum by visiting social bookmarks that others have created. Social bookmarking makes finding a site that you know you saved somewhere easier to find. I am all about organization! I created by social bookmark by using diigo. Visit my social bookmarking site http://www.diigo.com/user/jmb091.

There are many creative lesson plans that teachers can use involving Excel. One of these lesson plans includes students creating a hypothesis using independent and dependent variables. Then students have to write a questionnaire in order to prove or disprove their hypothesis. Students will use Excel to organize their results and analyze them. Students will input all their data into Excel in order to create charts to view their results. This lesson is designed for grades 9 through 12.

A science lesson plan that involves using Excel has students visiting a website about acid rain and putting in their current location. The students will have to create a database in Excel using the information the website provides. This lesson plan is designed for grades 7 through 12.

Another science lesson plan for secondary students involves learning about earthquakes. Simulating earthquakes is a template that teachers can use for Excel to have their students to keep track of data. Once the data is put into an Excel database, students can simulate the earthquakes using their data.

Excel can also be used in math class. A lesson plan for math might include having students use Excel to keep track of probability. Students can receive a bag of candy, and they will have to guess as to what color candy they are going to select. The students will use Excel to organize their guesses as well as their findings. Students can also use Excel to calculate the average color per bag. This lesson works best for grades 7 and 8.

Another math lesson, more for elementary school, could have students create patterns of different shapes by using the program Rectangle Patterns Grid, which is a program for Excel. Then students can learn how to shade the shapes by using different tools in Excel. The students can then quiz each other about what shape comes next in their sequence.