http://lessonplans.btskinner.com/computer.html
This site had great ideas on interdisciplinary lesson plans with different computer programs. There was a “Using word drawing Tools to create a comic strip for Social Studies” that looked really good. A really cool lesson on using spreadsheets was submitted by Sara Hough called, “Let’s Go Shopping”. The main idea was to have students bring in receipts (at least three) from a grocery store or Wal-Mart, etc. Then they use the items on their receipts and using function formulas to find out discounts, averages, and total items. I thought this was a great lesson because technology and real world experience are being integrated with the core subject of math. The real world experience comes in because you could do things like give out “coupons” and have the students add another column to figure out what the bill would be with those new discounts. This is a real world situation (grocery shopping) that they may do with their parents now and will hopefully do on their own in the future. excelrecp.html
For those of us who would like to compare something more fun than groceries there was a link by Microsoft on using Excel to “compare your dream cars”! Maybe change the items compared to dream houses or something of that nature for students who aren’t into cars. http://www.microsoft.com/education/dreamcar.mspx
I thought your lesson plan activity for "Let's Go Shopping" was a great idea maybe for upper Elementary-Middle School grades, but I think that younger grades may have difficulty coming up with formulas in Microsoft Excel. Maybe this could be a classroom activity where the teacher is using the smartboard to demonstrate the formulas to the entire class. This could help practice various math functions or counting that they might be learning in their textbooks. I also thought the dream car example was a fun idea for students to learn excel in a variety of grades and subjects. For example, the younger grades could use an Excel spreadsheet to find the "median" of the car prices, or simply use the sum or average functions to calculate the total or average prices of the various cars they chose to compare.
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