Spreadsheets, EasyBib, and SurveyMonkey are Fun and Useful!

Week 3 of cedu 510 was fun because the software is fascinating to me and I was able to apply Excel, EasyBib, and SurveyMonkey almost immediately to my classes at Falls North. I will use Excel to create a unit pricing lesson plan in my Financial Life Skills classes. In this Consumerism unit activity, students will calculate unit pricing for various grocery items found on-line or in print ads. Thanksgiving food ads should provide a wealth of fun materials! We will work on labels, numbers, formulas, formatting, etc. We used EasyBib with my Computer Applications students. We stress how important citing sources is and this free software allowed my 8th graders to create citations for their own books, on-line newspaper articles, and "How Stuff Works" Web pages. Other than the fact that our school district does not allow students to save EasyBib citations directly into Word, (I could with my teacher rights when I tested it) the lesson went very well. Finally, I used SurveyMonkey to create a 7-question survey for my FLS students. I wanted their feedback on our recent bank field trip and banker guest speaker. Not only did I get useful and honest (anonymous) responses, but many were humorous as only 8th and 9th graders can be. I will bring a print copy of the results to share this Tuesday.
I am an average user of Excel, both in my teaching and in my part-time work at my brother's gas grill store. This allows me to make the following comparisons between Excel and the Google Spreadsheet program that we used this week:

• I liked the autosave function in Google. It is easy to forget to save when using any MS Office program.
• The lack of charting bothered me because my students love to create simple Excel charts when we do our introductory Skittles Excel activity.
• I miss the undo arrow in Google. This MS function is very helpful for me as I often make a change and then change my mind immediately.
• Google seemed slow when making changes in the spreadsheet. Excel spoils me with its quickness.
• I liked the ease of "merge across" in Google. This was easier to locate than Excel's button for the same function.
• Minor issues with Google include: not enough options for decimals, inability to freeze and protect columns (useful when helping my brother with his wide grill pricing spreadsheets), no shrink-to-fit option or headers/footers when printing (limits how a spreadsheet can be printed), cannot change order of worksheet tabs, and no Find command (these last two would cause problems with spreadsheets I create for the summer fastpitch team I coach)

Finally, I am unclear why anyone would use Google spreadsheets, unless they did not have MS Office. Google seems to stress that their collaboration features are important but I have never had a problem in sending Excel spreadsheets as attachments to others for revising and reviewing.