This weeks applications adventure was a combining of Word and Excel called mail merger. All I can say is: Wow! I thought I was experienced in Microsoft products but this was new to me and it was awesome. For those of you not experienced in this, mail merging allows you to type up a form in word and insert information from an Excel file. For example, this week we made a grade book created in Excel and used Word to create a form letter and have it automatically insert fields from the spreadsheet, such as first and last name, grades and comments. Once the form was completed you simply hit merge fields and you have personalized lists for everyone. I can see many uses for this in my school, more to help my colleagues than to help myself but, it's all about sharing that information. We did not get into using filtering to create specific lists but that was a neat feature I got to play around with. It could be used for students that have not achieved a certain average or for attendance reports, really the list goes on and on. And while I would love to go on I will end it here and let you all explore mail mergers for yourself.
Until next time.
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Joe and Microsoft's Excellent Adventure
Another post, another movie title reference. Unfortunately, not another dollar to go along with this post, but I'm not doing it for the fame or money. I, like others, am posting for the ultimate extrinsic motivator...a grade. Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed blogging. I have wanted to start for a while. Hopefully this class will get me in the habit and I will continue to give my thoughts on Ed Tech.
This week I got to play around with Excel. Now I enjoy spreadsheets and have played around with excel in the past. However, I had a chance to reintroduce myself to Excel using the 2010 version this time around. I enjoyed it. The grade book was fun to format and being into math I also really enjoyed creating the formulas for the weighted grade. I want to do something similar to this at work where we keep track of student competencies for jobs that they do. The forms are already in Excel it's just a matter of formatting and adding formulas and linking workbooks together. The other part of the project was more fun. I never really thought about how to use excel with my students. Alternate assessment time is coming up and with 3 out of 7 students needing high school evaluations done this year it is certainly on my mind. Graphing and reading graphs are part of the math grade level indicators so I went and played around with making surveys and graphs and pie charts. Instead of using Boardmaker, I am going to try and do some work on Excel for my students to do this year. I also enjoyed making math worksheets. It would be better if I found a way to randomize numbers within a range in order to make it more challenging.
Well another week down and another application explored. Until next week.
This week I got to play around with Excel. Now I enjoy spreadsheets and have played around with excel in the past. However, I had a chance to reintroduce myself to Excel using the 2010 version this time around. I enjoyed it. The grade book was fun to format and being into math I also really enjoyed creating the formulas for the weighted grade. I want to do something similar to this at work where we keep track of student competencies for jobs that they do. The forms are already in Excel it's just a matter of formatting and adding formulas and linking workbooks together. The other part of the project was more fun. I never really thought about how to use excel with my students. Alternate assessment time is coming up and with 3 out of 7 students needing high school evaluations done this year it is certainly on my mind. Graphing and reading graphs are part of the math grade level indicators so I went and played around with making surveys and graphs and pie charts. Instead of using Boardmaker, I am going to try and do some work on Excel for my students to do this year. I also enjoyed making math worksheets. It would be better if I found a way to randomize numbers within a range in order to make it more challenging.
Well another week down and another application explored. Until next week.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
The Wonderful World of Word
This past week I got to work with Microsoft Word. First, I want to talk about getting word. I have an older computer. I am running Microsoft XP and I have had Word 97. Well, that is not nearly new enough for a newly matriculated (for the second time) graduate student. I was like a kid in a candy shop at Best Buy. I bought a new 2 TB external hard drive and the university version of office 2010! So needless to say I was excited this week to try out my new Word 2010. I have used Word 2007 at work but using MY version was so much more gratifying.
I was impressed with some of the additions to word. Like I said before I have used 2007 a bit but just for basic word processing. I create a lot of social narratives I use with my students or letters to send home to parents.
My first project used smartart. I never used smart art before and really enjoyed using it. It made making my graphic organizers much easier. I easily could have made 3 very different graphic organizers for this project. I will continue to use this feature in my classroom to create visuals for my students.
My second project was a calendar. Long ago, I made several templates in Word 97 for calendars where the months started on each different day of the week. I had to format the table to get everything right and the headers are not all the same. This easily takes care of all the little formatting issues I would have spent a long time worrying about trying to make my calendar look professional. I am going to use the calendar I created for my lesson plan book for October.
My final project was a timeline about the civil war. My students will not learn about the civil war as most things we do are life skills curriculum. I wanted to do something fun for me. I enjoy learning and reading about the civil war so I wanted to do this. I really liked doing this project although it was not much more than table with some shapes. I decided to add hyperlinks. I did not spend too much time looking for good links, I just wanted to do it as something I could envision using with this type of word file.
Overall, I love word as I have used it for a very long time (I won't say how long as it may indicate how old I really am). I enjoyed learning about these new templates on word and look forward to using them to help make my job preparing and planning a little easier.
Until next week :)
I was impressed with some of the additions to word. Like I said before I have used 2007 a bit but just for basic word processing. I create a lot of social narratives I use with my students or letters to send home to parents.
My first project used smartart. I never used smart art before and really enjoyed using it. It made making my graphic organizers much easier. I easily could have made 3 very different graphic organizers for this project. I will continue to use this feature in my classroom to create visuals for my students.
My second project was a calendar. Long ago, I made several templates in Word 97 for calendars where the months started on each different day of the week. I had to format the table to get everything right and the headers are not all the same. This easily takes care of all the little formatting issues I would have spent a long time worrying about trying to make my calendar look professional. I am going to use the calendar I created for my lesson plan book for October.
My final project was a timeline about the civil war. My students will not learn about the civil war as most things we do are life skills curriculum. I wanted to do something fun for me. I enjoy learning and reading about the civil war so I wanted to do this. I really liked doing this project although it was not much more than table with some shapes. I decided to add hyperlinks. I did not spend too much time looking for good links, I just wanted to do it as something I could envision using with this type of word file.
Overall, I love word as I have used it for a very long time (I won't say how long as it may indicate how old I really am). I enjoyed learning about these new templates on word and look forward to using them to help make my job preparing and planning a little easier.
Until next week :)
Monday, September 10, 2012
Google Apps
I had the opportunity to use Google docs for my applications class this past week. I have had some experience using Google docs in the past, but not too much. So here is my impression of the good, the bad, and the ugly of Google Docs.
First, the good. I loved using Google docs and saw MANY uses for it in my current position. For example, while I mainly use the computer in my classroom for work related documents it would be a huge relief to be flexible to move anywhere within the school building to work, or even at home in those rare instances that I am able to work at home. I typically use flash drives to do this, but found them to be unreliable. Over the summer i made the grave mistake of making one of those impulse buys at a store that had 8GB flash drives for $10. My spiddy senses should have gone off at the point realizing that a flash drive of that size at that price had to be too good to be true. I found out why 3 days later when I plugged my drive into the usb port and everything I had was gone. Luckily, we were not too far and I did not loose too much but a lot of trouble could have been avoided if I just used Google Docs and my Google drive. I also love the ability for multiple users to edit a document simultaneously in real time. This is another great feature I could use in my current position. I have to make individual schedules for each of my students. However, I need to include the schedules the adaptive phys. ed. teacher, music therapists, occupational therapist, speech therapists, transition coordinators, and any other person that needs to see the student into account. I have done this for 8 years now and not once have I made it through without there being some sort of scheduling conflict that has been overlooked. Utilizing google docs would hopefully eliminate these conflicts.
Now the bad. There are fewer "bad" issues and they are minor. The main bad issue is that the storage is unlimited for Google docs created or converted files. However, when you want to store files in different formats you run into storage limits. There is a 5 GB limit for free storage on Google drive of non-Google doc formats. I tend to do a lot of activities on Boardmaker Plus and Boardmaker Studio. These files take up more space than Google docs so its not a big issues but not something that can be looked over either.I have also not looked into how easy it is for non-Google users to edit shared documents. This would definitely be something that needs to be taken into account if I plan on using this before the rest of my school is on board. Anothe issue I had was the print function. I was a little put off by google docs having to make things into PDF then having to print separately from the PDF. My margins in the document were not the same from Google to pdf which can cause issues when formatting documents to be on a single page.
Finally, the ugly. The issue is not so ugly for me, but I can see some people I work with having a HUGE issue with moving to Google doc created schedules. For example, the adapted phys. ed. teacher would have too many individual schedules to edit. There are 24 classrooms on our campus, 21 rooms have 7 students, 1 room has 6 and 2 have 8 students - that is 169 individual schedules she would have to edit. I certainly sympathize with this I do see this as a way of avoiding those scheduling conflicts that come in the beginning of each semester and summer session. While this issue has some possible solutions, such as having one of our teacher aides take care of this, it must be addressed in order to gain support from all different staff members.
Overall, I am impressed with what Google docs and drive have to offer. I am going to start using this and hopefully convert some of my coworkers to using this to create schedules, share lesson plans, and create curriculum.
First, the good. I loved using Google docs and saw MANY uses for it in my current position. For example, while I mainly use the computer in my classroom for work related documents it would be a huge relief to be flexible to move anywhere within the school building to work, or even at home in those rare instances that I am able to work at home. I typically use flash drives to do this, but found them to be unreliable. Over the summer i made the grave mistake of making one of those impulse buys at a store that had 8GB flash drives for $10. My spiddy senses should have gone off at the point realizing that a flash drive of that size at that price had to be too good to be true. I found out why 3 days later when I plugged my drive into the usb port and everything I had was gone. Luckily, we were not too far and I did not loose too much but a lot of trouble could have been avoided if I just used Google Docs and my Google drive. I also love the ability for multiple users to edit a document simultaneously in real time. This is another great feature I could use in my current position. I have to make individual schedules for each of my students. However, I need to include the schedules the adaptive phys. ed. teacher, music therapists, occupational therapist, speech therapists, transition coordinators, and any other person that needs to see the student into account. I have done this for 8 years now and not once have I made it through without there being some sort of scheduling conflict that has been overlooked. Utilizing google docs would hopefully eliminate these conflicts.
Now the bad. There are fewer "bad" issues and they are minor. The main bad issue is that the storage is unlimited for Google docs created or converted files. However, when you want to store files in different formats you run into storage limits. There is a 5 GB limit for free storage on Google drive of non-Google doc formats. I tend to do a lot of activities on Boardmaker Plus and Boardmaker Studio. These files take up more space than Google docs so its not a big issues but not something that can be looked over either.I have also not looked into how easy it is for non-Google users to edit shared documents. This would definitely be something that needs to be taken into account if I plan on using this before the rest of my school is on board. Anothe issue I had was the print function. I was a little put off by google docs having to make things into PDF then having to print separately from the PDF. My margins in the document were not the same from Google to pdf which can cause issues when formatting documents to be on a single page.
Finally, the ugly. The issue is not so ugly for me, but I can see some people I work with having a HUGE issue with moving to Google doc created schedules. For example, the adapted phys. ed. teacher would have too many individual schedules to edit. There are 24 classrooms on our campus, 21 rooms have 7 students, 1 room has 6 and 2 have 8 students - that is 169 individual schedules she would have to edit. I certainly sympathize with this I do see this as a way of avoiding those scheduling conflicts that come in the beginning of each semester and summer session. While this issue has some possible solutions, such as having one of our teacher aides take care of this, it must be addressed in order to gain support from all different staff members.
Overall, I am impressed with what Google docs and drive have to offer. I am going to start using this and hopefully convert some of my coworkers to using this to create schedules, share lesson plans, and create curriculum.
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