Week 5 Blog

Week Five (Chapter Five & Six)
1. What is productivity software? How can it be adapted to benefit teaching and learning? What are the advantages and features of electronic spreadsheets? How do you see them as a benefit in an educational environment?
Productivity software is usually generic based business application software that educators can use and adapt for the professional and administrative tasks they must address. Examples of productivity software are basic word processing, spreadsheet, and database management software. Productivity software benefits both the teacher and the learner in several ways. It assists educators in preparing memos, letters, reports, and budgets. It also assists educators in tracking student information, computing grades, and preparing lesson plans and IEPs. The school I work for uses software like this to keep a record of student attendance as well. We use this type of software for completing lesson plans and for showing teaching strategies, as well as for showing different ways in which we as teachers intervene when a student is having problems with an objective. This is a great way to keep track of what we as teachers are covering, and how the students react to it. Productivity software is very beneficial to students, as well, in that it helps educators create creative activity worksheets and transparencies that the students enjoy and learn from. Finally, the software helps educators create grade reports and parent letters, as well as store business and parent phone numbers.
The advantages and features of electronic spreadsheets is amazing. Some features of electronic spreadsheets include the ability to do just about anything you want with statistical information of all sorts including organizing data into columns and rows, color coding data, creating graphs and charts, and calculating information via formulas. Perhaps the neatest feature of electronic spreadsheets is its ability to perform what- if analysis, which is the act of entering a set of numeric data for the purpose of displaying what the numbers would look like if certain scenarios were to happen. For example, if a principal wanted to know how a new bill would affect his or her budget. Those are just a few features of electronic spreadsheets. The advantages of these types of spreadsheets include total accuracy and the ability to be easily modified. No longer would a person have to manually check and recheck their numbers. With electronic spreadsheets, it is a safe bet that when accurate information is submitted to the spreadsheet, an accurate computation will result every time. Also, if the numbers need to be changed for some reason or something needs to be added or taken away from the data, then the possibility of that happening is 100 percent and is unbelievably easy to do. Manually modifying numbers manually is unbelievably tedious and tiring.