Taught by a 10-year veteran of both the classroom and the school computer lab, Microsoft Excel 2003 in the Classroom is a unique online workshop packed full of tips, shortcuts, and lesson plan ideas just for teachers who want to bring the power of Excel into their classrooms, both as an organizational tool and as a teaching aid.

You'll learn all the important Excel basics: Using the toolbars, formatting cells and worksheets, inserting formulas for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and creating colorful charts and graphs. Then you'll move on to some more advanced Excel features: Sorting and analyzing student test data, writing powerful mathematical formulas, and using the Function Wizard to automatically calculate student averages and other statistics. You'll finish up the course by creating a fully customizable grade book that you use in your own classroom.

Throughout the course, you'll explore standards-based lesson plans and activities that will allow you to pass your Excel knowledge on to your students, no matter what grade level you teach. By the end of this course, you'll have a solid understanding of the basic functions of Excel, and a wealth of ideas for integrating this powerful technology into your lesson plans across your curriculum.

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Syllabus:

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when the lesson is released, but you must complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

A new section of each course starts on the second or third Wednesday of each month. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week One

Wednesday - Lesson 01

We'll start off our first lesson by going over some of the terms most commonly used in Excel, and then we'll take a tour through the various features of an Excel workbook to get you acquainted with the look and feel of the application. You'll learn easy ways to move your cell pointer around within the Excel workspace, as well as a few keyboard shortcuts that will help you move to where the action is a little more quickly. At the end of this first lesson, you'll get to try your hand at creating your first Excel formula.

Friday - Lesson 02

In this lesson, you're going to create your first worksheet! We'll start by going over the five steps you'll need to follow to create a worksheet in Excel: Stating your objective, adding labels, adding numbers, adding formulas, and changing the overall look of the worksheet using pre-designed templates. We'll also begin our ongoing discussion about ways you can use Excel in your classroom to improve student learning across your curriculum.

Week Two

Wednesday - Lesson 03

In today's lesson, you'll learn some valuable techniques that will help you save a lot of time while using Excel. The first and the best technique is called Auto Fill, and I know you're going to get a lot of use out of it! Excel's Auto Fill allows you to enter a series of numbers, dates, or other values into your worksheets as quickly as you can click and drag your mouse. We'll practice using it to enter some of Excel's standard lists (months of the year, days of the week), then we'll go over how to create custom Auto Fill lists to help you enter text that you need to enter often—like the names of your students. After that, we'll go over some of Excel's advanced formatting options to make your numbers appear as currency, percents, or carried out to various decimal places.

Friday - Lesson 04

A picture is worth a thousand words! And when it comes to worksheets full of complex data calculations, that old saying is even more true. In this lesson, you'll learn how to use Excel's handy Chart Wizard to display the data you've entered in colorful charts that give meaning to your numbers. After we take a look at a few of Excel's many chart styles, we'll practice adding defining information to your charts, such as titles, data labels, and legends. Then we'll go over how to customize the colors of your chart. We'll finish with a discussion on the many ways you can use charting and graphing tools across your curriculum.

Week Three

Wednesday - Lesson 05

In this, the second lesson in our two-part discussion on Excel's Chart Wizard, we'll go over advanced charting techniques. You'll learn how to use the wizard to change chart types, add text, add shapes, and even add your own pictures to your charts. Then we'll take a tour of the Drawing toolbar, where you'll find the tools you need to add lines, arrows, and other helpful graphic features to your charts. And, as with most lessons in this course, I'll give you more lesson plan ideas that you can use to bring these Excel techniques into your own classroom.

Friday - Lesson 06

In today's lesson, you'll find out how to turn any old worksheet into a database. Because once you're working with a database, you'll gain access to one of Excel's most helpful features: The Data menu. Through this menu, you'll be able to easily locate, organize, and summarize the information you need. We'll practice using it with a sample database, and then we'll explore Excel's AutoFilter, AutoSum, and Sort features. With these tools, you'll be able to quickly sort and group your students for differentiated instruction.

Week Four

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Today we're going to take a break from the step-by-step Excel instruction to visualize how it will look when you begin using this valuable program in your own classroom, no matter what grade level you teach. We're going to review three teacher-created lesson plans for grades 1-4, 5-8, and 9-12 and then talk about ways you can adjust these lesson plans for different age groups, different content areas, and different learning styles and needs.

Friday - Lesson 08

In this lesson, you'll learn about the three different types of cell references that you can incorporate into a formula, and I'll explain when you should use each one. This is great information if you plan to use Excel to help you maintain a budget for your classroom, or if you're teaching a lesson on money and budgets!

Week Five

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Now that you know all the ins and outs of creating one worksheet, it's time to increase the difficulty factor, and really organize your classroom! Today, you're going to learn how to use sheet references to create three-dimensional workbooks, linking different worksheets so that the linked information updates automatically. This can be really helpful if you want to create monthly or quarterly grade books, and then compile all that information into one end-of-year grade summary for each of your students. We'll also discuss ways you can use linked workbooks in cooperative learning projects with your students.

Friday - Lesson 10

Remember statistics class in high school? It wasn't the easiest class, but now that you're a teacher, you know how important statistics are when you're trying to evaluate your students' assessment scores. Excel to the rescue! Today we're going to go over the basics of statistics in Excel. You'll learn how to use functions to simplify the process of calculating averages, deviations, minimums, maximums, modes, and more. We'll also discuss how these tools can help you target your students' strengths and areas of need.

Week Six

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Today's lesson is all about saving you time. We'll go over how to use macros to automate all your tedious tasks in Excel, and then I'll show you how to build a macro of your very own. You'll also learn how to add time-saving buttons to the toolbars at the top of your screen. And we'll talk about ways you can customize those toolbars to better meet your needs. At the end of this lesson, I'll show you one feature that won't save you any time at all, but will allow you to have some fun customizing the images and colors of the icons on your toolbars. But a word of warning: Don't share this one with your students if you want to keep their full attention in the computer lab!

Friday - Lesson 12

In our final lesson, we'll put everything you've learned together into one final project—an electronic grade book that you can use in your own classroom! Even if you already have one, you'll want to follow along to see what's going on behind the scenes in Excel. Plus, when we build this grade book, you'll have the chance to customize it for your own needs while reviewing most of the skills you've learned throughout the course. And I'll show you a few new skills, too. For instance, you'll learn how to create a formula that will assign each student a letter grade based on test or assessment averages. And then you'll learn how to apply conditional formatting to color-code your student lists according to those averages. This is a great skill to know if you like to separate your class into different reading, math, or other groups! Finally, you'll learn how to create and print a variety of group and individual-student charts and graphs based on your grade book data.

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Robin Sellers.

Robin Sellers holds a current teaching license. She has a Master of Arts degree in English with a concentration in technical and professional communication and a Bachelor of Arts degree in English with a certification in secondary education. Since 1995, she has taught at the secondary and post-secondary level. She encourages creativity in her classroom, teaches traditional curriculum classes in a computer lab, and incorporates technology including the Internet in her lessons. She also develops and teaches online curriculum courses. In 2003, she began teaching continuing education courses for teachers.

Requirements:

Microsoft Windows XP or 2000, Microsoft Excel 2003 or Microsoft Office 2003 (Student and Teacher Edition, Standard Edition, Small Business Edition, or Professional Edition are all acceptable - please be sure to install the software on your computer before the course begins), Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader). This course is not suitable for Macintosh users, nor for users of any of the 2007 versions of Microsoft Excel.

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