Gain: Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MOFTx7FB838rp0bMD_3qYgr9RY6Da4HpTdqbsocAozQ/edit#gid=0

1.  So I came into this with pretty much zero experience with spreadsheets.  I may have interacted with one in a middle school computer class or something in the past, but I definitely came in pretty lost with a lot to learn.  From the material given to us I understood that one could use Google Sheets to find percentages by programming individual cells.  That sounded interesting to me but honestly I was still lost after going through the reading.  This is really something that needs to be played around with before it can really be understood.  So that is how I spent my most productive time in Sheets- playing around with the columns and watching videos to try and understand how it all works.

I was tempted to just give all of the grades a possible total equal to that of its weight so that I could simply add up the scores and have the final grades, but that is really impractical of course (how many quizzes are out of one point?) and this is technology that I think I will definitely have to come back to so I wanted to make some sort of dent in it.  So my goal was to get the totals using functions so that I would have the software working for me in some way.  I did it by creating extra columns that hold the total for each grading area (assignments, quizzes, etc.) out of one.  So that way the total would be a decimal that could be multiplied by its weight and when they are all added up they make the final grade out of one hundred.  For example, V2 (Final Grade) had this function in it: =(U2*20)+(R2*45)+(N2*15)+(C2*10)+(B2*10).

So I was able to make it work for me to a certain extent, but I still feel like I am missing a world of information on this. None of it was really easy until I found a method and stuck with it. If I have a question it would be, "what am I missing?" I know I am missing something that would make all of this easier and more practical but I do not know what that is right now. But like I said, this was an initial stab at making a spreadsheet and if nothing else I at least produced what I think are accurate results.


2. This subject was a difficult one to learn about through reading. I learned a little bit of vocabulary and had a little bit more of an idea of what I would be doing but I really didn't start learning about Sheets until I started looking at videos and especially when I started playing with the functions myself. However, I believe the use of Sheets in the classroom was well described and even though when I read the chapter I was very ignorant of Sheets, I still gained an understanding of how Sheets can fulfill Common Core Standards from the reading. Again, Google Drive comes out strong for this app in the classroom. A teacher can create a Spreadsheet and post the link, the students can copy that Sheet and use it for an array of assignments that fulfill technological and mathematical standards. For example, the standards that says, "Show data by making a line plot..." can be fulfilled in Sheets because charts can be inserted into them according to the data that has been entered into the cells.