Have you ever played that game where you explain the one item you would choose to take with you if you were stuck on a deserted island? Well, what if the scenario was changed to the world of education and you had to pick only one technology tool for students and teachers to use? If I had to make that choice, I would pick the spreadsheet.
In my opinion the spreadsheet is an often overlooked instructional tool. It is certainly one of the most powerful applications available to teachers in terms of computing power and robustness of features. But the reason I like it so much is that it is really good at doing all the things that computers do well (recording, calculating, organizing, displaying data, etc.) in ways that help humans do what they excel at (creating, analyzing, and evaluating). The seminal article Partners in Cognition: Extending Human Intelligence With Intelligent Technologies explores this concept in depth.
These past few weeks I have been working quite a bit with staff who are using spreadsheets in a variety of contexts.
Dottie Bentley at the Middle School has been doing some exciting things with her enrichment students and has incorporated spreadsheet applications to support their thinking. One example is this spreadsheet that students used to assist with their passive solar home designs. The spreadsheet calculates the ratio of window square footage to total square footage to aid in design decision making. Another project her students did was bridge building. They used this spreadsheet to calculate strength to weight ratios and then make comparisons between bridges. Here is a presentation (including a video of the testing) by the winning bridge builders if you want to have a look.
One of the spreadsheet tools that SCSD teacher now have at their disposal is Google Spreadsheets. A feature of these spreadsheets is that multiple people can make changes to the same sheet. This allows teams of students and teachers to collaborate together on a spreadsheet in real time.
The Middle School staff is using this technology to support their efforts to provide interventions to struggling students. Administration, teachers, and support staff use this spreadsheet (this is a training version so feel free to experiment) jointly as a communication tool to coordinate the extended day intervention. The use of the spreadsheet allows everyone to be on the same page with regard to how the intervention is working for every student at any time. It also allows for the tracking of data which can help to inform decision making with regards to trends in student behaviors.
Another feature that works together with Google Spreadsheets is Google Forms. Forms let you create custom surveys, quizzes, feedback documents, etc. that can be used to collect data from groups of people. The results feed directly into a spreadsheet. In addition, there are custom programs available to use which can automate tasks such as grading, reporting, or presenting information in meaningful ways. One such program that is commonly used by educators is the Flubaroo script which grades assessments automatically.
The Middle School is leveraging this technology to run their Google Ninja program (More about this program in a future blog post). This voluntary program lets students get recognition for their efforts to learn more about technology in their free time. The students engage in self-guided and paced learning activities related to Google Applications and then test their knowledge using online tests. There is a massive amount of test taking and grading involved but the Google Spreadsheets combined with Forms and Flubaroo make this very manageable.
The 3rd grade team at the elementary school is also experimenting with the Forms, Spreadsheet, and Flubaroo technologies. They give regular common reading assessments to all students in the third grade. They are finding that administering the assessments using these tools allows them to get feedback to students immediately, analyze student performance data more easily and free up time they previously spent grading to use for other tasks such as preparing for instruction. They chose to use this combination of programs because it allows them to work collaboratively to share the load of creating the assessments while still permitting them to see data for their specific groups of students.
Spreadsheets can also be used across the curriculum in a wide variety of ways. Here are some examples of instruction from other districts where spreadsheets are applied in subjects where you might not expect to see them:
A first grade teacher that used spreadsheets to help students visualize when learning geography.
A fourth grade teacher that incorporated spreadsheets into a social learning activity about Native Americans.
And a high school teacher that had students use spreadsheets to analyze The Catcher in the Rye and then support a data driven discussion.
Truly the possibilities for innovating with spreadsheets are endless!
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