Fun with data

I guess I didn't completely understand the directions for this assignment. From what I was reading, I was under the impression that we did not need to submit the assignment until all the components were complete. The smart thing to do would have been to submit my work as soon as I had finished it early last week, but I've been a little scatter brained since my husband returned from Iraq on Friday. I'm just now starting to get back into real life after being so off for a few days.

This assignment was quite easy once I got a grasp on what was required of me. I love using Excel and enjoy formatting the equations and the document. The formatting assignment was simple; just make the second and third worksheets look like the first worksheet. The manipulating assignment let me have fun with the equations and express what the data really reveals. Finally the narrative puts the data created through the equations into a written statement. Being able to use and manipulate data in Excel can prove to be useful in a wide variety of situations. I personally have used this program for market research, a wedding guest list, homework outlines, and a household budget. By teaching the students this program and the variety of ways it can be used, they will be able to use it in so many different ways in the future.

Formatting
Manipulating
Narrative

Rubistar - a day late

Unfortunately I did not get this assignment completed on time. It didn't take long to actually do the assignment, but life seemed to get in the way this week. I imediately knew what I was going to base my rubric on since I have been grading assignments in the clinical assignment. This rubric would be used to grade assignments completed in Microsoft Excel. Students are required to follow the 5 case assignments at the end of the chapter and the results should look identical to the final example given in the book. All assignments consist of primarily numbers and entering one number incorrectly will cause three other numbers in the spreadsheet to be incorrect.

I liked what Rubistar had to offer and it makes creating rubrics amazingly easy and I know that I will be bookmarking this website to use when I do teaching in the future. Creating a rubric when creating and grading assignments helps not only allows the students to know what is expected of them, but also allows the teacher to have a guideline as to the grading standards. This helps eliminate any vairation in how the assignments are graded.

Rubric

Movie Maker

This assignment was the worst so far. First, I was not expecting it to be the next assignment that was due, so as of Tuesday morning, when I received the email about the change of schedule, I had not even started working on it. I already had the program installed on my computer, so that was not a problem. However, when trying to actually create the movie, I encountered more problems than I was capable of handling. After the program was open for about five minutes my computer would shut down completely. Finally I had to start timing myself and make sure that I saved what I had finished before the computer shut down. In order to completely finish the movie I restarted my computer over twenty times. Not exactly my idea of a pleasurable evening of exploring technology.

If this program ever worked properly, I think it would be a good device to use in order to present information to my students. The program itself was not hard to use, if I could just get it to work for more than five minutes at a time. I have used other similar programs in the past and although Movie Maker was simple to use, I feel that I could do more with a different program.



*** MOVIE MAKER ***