GAIN, 5-13-15

I have rarely ever used spreadsheets. I've updated address and contact information for some businesses that kept their info on Excel, but never to tally grades and such. So I had to watch all the tutorials to figure out this Google Sheets thing. I think it's a good program, extremely similar to Excel from what I can tell, but useful in an educational setting. Science classes can use it to enter data in for experiments, math classes can use it for...whatever computing they do. Teachers can use it (as I tried to demonstrate) for keeping up with grades. This keeps the grades accessible anywhere there's Internet, rather than the old fashioned way of keeping the grades in an actual grade book.

To me, the easiest part of figuring out Sheets was the formatting. With a toolbar similar to that of Microsoft Excel and Word, doing what I wanted to with the font and such was easy. it was difficult for me to figure out how to sum, average and such, and I may need to work some more with it to master it. This technology is just too much for my simple mind to handle.

Here's a link to my spreadsheet;  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1YUmkJyg7WpdWvvg5TCbFuJe383D7fJXGH2dC33cgYN4/edit?usp=sharing

In the text, graham points out that Google Spreadsheets satisfies the Standard for Mathematical Practice 5. This program "allows students to collect data in cells and manipulate the data to make charts and graphs that the student can use to explain his or her findings," as it states on page 93.Using spreadsheets also better prepares the student to collect, manipulate, share, and present data. As our society become more and more STEM focused, technology usage will go up. And with more and more students being pushed to go into a science field, then they need to have a mastery of how to best enter and show their data in an organized way.