Beginning Excel 2010 Syllabus for 5 Week Course

Excel is one of those programs I didn't truly understand until I was asked to teach Beginning Excel--the basics.

At first, I was terrified. I had used Excel a lot. Almost every day. I am the Budget Queen, so I used Excel to track all my expenses and felt that didn't qualify me to teach. But a lot of people had faith in me. So, I said I'd do it.

Thankfully, my advisers provide me with every necessary tool to be successful at my job. I am a HUGE, HUGE fan of Labyrinth Learning. They have great books and I won't teach a class unless I get to pick from their selection. I have yet to use their Teacher Edition. I create all of my lesson plans from the same book my students use. If I don't know how to do something, I spend the hours searching and trying to find the answer on my own. The harder I work for the answer, the better prepared I am to teach it.

For my beginning class, I chose Labyrinth's Microsoft Excel 2010: Level 1. It comes with 6 lesson plans that I condensed into a 5 week course.

After each lesson, I have the students work on their own for 30 minutes. I have them download the Student Data Files to get more comfortable with the content we cover.

When I receive a book, the first thing I do is plan out the overview of my syllabus. Here is the syllabus for Excel Level 1:

Week 1 (~2 hours): The Basics

• Locate and open the program
• Excel Layout - Home tab, columns vs. rows

Week 2 (~2 hours): The Worksheet

• Selecting cells and ranges
• Cut, Copy, and Paste
• Undo and Redo

Week 3 (~2 hours): Changing the Appearance of Worksheets

• Printing worksheets
• Editing workbook properties
• Modifying columns and rows

Week 4 (~2 hours): Working with Formulas and Functions

• Creating formulas
• Cell references
• Modifying and copying formulas
• Using Insert Function

Week 5 (~2 hours): Format

• Formatting numbers 
• Creating charts

In the next couple of weeks, I will post each lesson in-depth and then do the same for Intermediate and Advanced Excel 2010. 

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

Happy Teaching!
Jessica

PowerPoint Project Idea For Your Computer Class

I'm always trying to come up with ideas for my class projects because I think that the best way for my students to learn is to take everything they've been taught and create something positive.

So, for my Advanced Computer Class, I had my students create a 9-slide PowerPoint presentation on their dream vacation. They had to present their PowerPoint's and they had a blast!

Here's how I went about it:

First, we devoted an entire day to the basics of PowerPoint. We covered title slides, basic slides, themes, bullet points, and refreshed our memories on font and font size.

Then, I let them loose for 20 minutes. They played around with the different buttons and asked me lots of questions. Finally, we ended the last class going back over how to download a picture from the internet.

Then, I showed them an example and asked them to think long and hard about their own dream vacation.

The next week, I used the projector and had them follow along with me as we designed our own presentations.

We started with the title slide, text, and theme. Each student chose their own theme and their own destination.

After that, we moved onto the slide where they had to include where they were going and a picture that represented the place.

I chose a road trip across Canada for my example!

Then, each student had to choose six things to do on their dream vacation and create slides with pictures and descriptions.

For the last slide, the students were asked to end their presentation with a creative slide that wrapped everything up. My example was a recap of the miles traveled across Canada. 

My students had a great time with this engaging assignment and had a blast asking each other questions about their presentations. I am looking forward to doing it with my next class.

Note: all images were used for educational purposes only.