Course Outline for Microsoft Excel 2007 for Teachers

Before you teach your students to use Excel, you'll need to learn the basics of this great program. So we'll start off our first lesson by going over some of the terms that are 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 and how you can use it in the classroom. 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.

In this lesson, you're going to create your first worksheet—a skill that you can teach in your own classroom! 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 predesigned templates. We'll also begin our ongoing discussion about ways you can use Excel in your classroom to improve student learning across your curriculum.

In today's lesson, you'll learn some valuable techniques that will help you save a lot of time in the classroom 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 like months of the year and 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 your classroom roster or athletic team roster. 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.

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 charting features 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.

In this, the second lesson in our two-part discussion on Excel's charting capabilities, we'll go over advanced charting techniques. You'll learn how to change chart types, add text, add shapes, and even add your own pictures to your charts. Then you'll find out how 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.

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.

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. You'll be able to easily locate, organize, and summarize the information you need. We'll practice using 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.

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!

Now that you know all the ins and outs of creating one worksheet, it's time to 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.

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. If you need to demonstrate and report student progress, this lesson is for you. 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.

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.

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 charts and graphs based on your grade book data.