Assignment #1

Initial Assignment

Since I do not currently hold a teaching position I asked a friend who is a teacher in a local school district middle school, if I could help her create a new lesson plan witch incorporated some technology in her classroom. She teaches home economics and her current topic was managing your own finances. In the past a lot of this topic was done by hand and with a calculator. We were able to incorporate Microsoft excel into the curriculum. Microsoft excel was used to help budget and then analyze each students budget.

Each student was asked to create a small income from a part time job or allowance. A few bills are also created, such as cell phone, clothes, saving for a car or other items, going to the movies, ect.. Based on the income and bills each student is asked to create a weekly budget so that they will have enough money for all of the items and activities they enjoy. When this lesson was put in motion I was able to sit in and observe as well as help out with explaining the great power that excel has.

While this lesson was unfolding I was observing and taking notes. One thing that i enjoyed was the ease of use that almost all of the kids had. They took to the computers like pros and very many topics and notions that might have to be explained and hard to comprehend for older users they already had a very good grasp on. The students were excited to learn how to use a program that many of them have on their computer but have not really used ever before.

It was nice to not have to explain computer basics and be able to dive right in to the new stuff but there were some problems. Since these were middle school children some of the more advanced and abstract concepts such as using variables that represented other cells or groups of cells was a little harder to explain, but once explained clearly it was no longer a problem. Time was a major problem, by the time the students were settled down and teaching began, it seemed like only minuets until we were running out of time. It was hard to tweak the lesson to fit into only one period.

Overall the students were very receptive to the use of technology that many of them already own and use but in a way to help them in every day life. The direct result and seeing how useful it could be really kept the children interested.