excel
sporte | November 21, 2008There's no question that the ability to work with information is one that will be required and valued for a long time to come. I think it's imperative for teachers to have students practice this skill whenever an opportunity comes about. The problem for many teachers is finding the time to identify good data sets.
MRSA stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a serious problem for hospital patients. Six of out seven people who become infected with MRSA, get it from some kind of health-care facility. In 2007, the CDC issued a report claiming that 18,000 people die every…
rallain | September 21, 2008**pre-reqs**: [kinematics](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-kinematics.php) *I don't think you need [part I of this](http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/2008/09/basics-making-graphs-with-ki…) if you don't want*
So, you still want to make a graph with that kinematics data? You think that graphs on paper are too barbaric? Well, if you are ready, you can use a spreadsheet. But be careful. If you don't know what you are doing, you can cause some damage (much like flying a 747 after reading a blog about it). Spreadsheets allow you to do a couple of things.
make pretty graphs…
sporte | June 1, 2008In part I, I wrote about my first semester of teaching on-line and talked about our challenges with technology. Blackboard had a database corruption event during finals week and I had all kinds of struggles with the Windows version of Microsoft Excel. Mike wrote and asked if I thought students should be working more with non-Microsoft software and what I thought the challenges would be in doing so.
I can answer with a totally unqualified "it depends."
First, I think knowing how to use a spread-sheet program is an advantage in many different kinds of fields and even in real-life, outside of…
sporte | March 14, 2008I've been writing quite a bit this week about my search for a cross platform spread sheet program that would support pivot tables and make pie graphs correctly.
This all started because of a bug that my students encountered in Microsoft Excel, on Windows. I'm not personally motivated to look for something new, since Office 2004 on Mac OS 10.5 doesn't seem to have the same bugs that appear on Windows. However, I would like things to work for my students. Since I don't want to have to write instructions for every software system on the planet, Google Docs would be my ideal answer, if it…
sporte | March 13, 2008I think all of us; me, the students the OO advocates, a thoughtful group of commenters, some instructors; I think many of us learned some things that we didn't anticipate the other day and got some interesting glimpses into the ways that other people view and interact with their computers.
Some of the people who participated in the challenge found out that it was harder than they expected.
Lessons learned
Okay, what did we learn?
1. The community is the best thing about Open Source
The Open Office advocates enjoy a challenge and are truly, quite helpful. That was something that adventure…
sporte | March 11, 2008The other day, I wrote that I wanted to make things easier for my students by using the kinds of software that they were likely to have on their computers and the kinds that they are likely to see in the business and biotech world when they graduate from college.
More than one person told me that I should have my students install an entirely different operating system and download OpenOffice to do something that looks a whole lot harder in Open Office than it is in Microsoft Excel.
I guess they missed the part where I said that I wanted to make the students work a little easier.
Before I go…