Alyson:

Discuss Excel spreadsheets as a pedagogical tool. What are the advantages and disadvantages and why?

Take Out Your Aggressions in Excel

I have never really used excel before now, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised with its uses. I have yet to master the program, actually I only really know how to do a few things, but even that has helped with my views of how I am going to teach in the classroom. The more technological tools I am brought face to face with, the more exciting lessons I can imagine.

When I asked a few of my friends if they had ever used excel in the mathematics classroom, they proclaimed that they hadn’t and they wouldn’t advise it. This made me put off using excel until the last possible moment, but now that I have I believe it will be a useful tool in the classroom and I encourage all teachers to embrace it.

Excel can basically do what a calculator does, but you can display as many answers as you want on the screen simultaneously. This in itself is enough to excite me as someone who always does one calculation at a time to avoid using brackets or having too long an equation in the calculator for fear of error. It can also produce graphs, which is helpful because who wants to draw a graph when the computer can do it for you?