Social Bookmarking and Excel Take On Education

Social bookmarking creates endless opportunities for educators to gather and organize vast amounts of information. The whole social aspect exponentially increases ones ability to expand his or her database of educational tools. Social bookmarking will help me stay organized and ready to present interesting, stimulating, and motivating ideas to my students. I chose Diigo as my preferred bookmarking site. My address is www.diigo.com/dashboard/alexchristina.

Now, let's move on to the subject of using Microsoft Excel in school curriculum. In history class students can create a timeline using the Excel timeline template. For instance, let's say you're studying the life of Thomas Jefferson in your class. With this tool students can plot all the significant dates in his life on a timeline in a well-organized document. This will allow a clearer picture of all of his accomplishments and the order in which they occurred.

Another way Excel can be used is for students to collect and graph data they have collected in a science class experiment. In one such experiment students can simulate earthquakes of different magnitudes and observe the effects on different buildings. Students will then be able to draw conclusions on the effectiveness of earthquake-proofing construction by analyzing the graphs they have created from their data in Excel.

A fun thing to do in health class would be to gather nutritional information on different meals from different fast food restaurants and graph the data using Excel. Students would pick comparable food items from each restaurant and find out the fat and calorie content for each item and for the total meal at each restaurant. This data would then be graphed so that students could see the amazing, and scary results of their research.

You could engage your students in a lesson involving something that affects their everyday life. Have them form a hypothesis about why the amount of daylight varies during the year. Then have them collect data on the times of sunrises and sunsets and use the data to create an Excel chart. The chart they create will help them understand how the Earth's rotation affects the amount of daylight over the year.

Bring to class several bags of M&M's candy and have students sort and classify the contents. Students will investigate the color distribution in the bags of M&M's. They will learn to use formulas, summarize their findings, and convert numbers into charts all by using M&M's and Excel.

By using some of these entertaining lesson plans you will be teaching without your students even realizing they're learning. So, go ahead and have fun!