IT for Education

Time to take a look at applications and other technology I use in my teaching. MS Office I've discussed it plenty in previous posts , but the Office suite is hands down my most used piece of software. There's PowerPoint of course, Word for making all the handouts, official docs etc, Outlook for most communications and Excel for marking, tracking student progression and so on. With the exception of Outlook I couldn't say they are all used every single day, but it's unusual if Word doesn't get launched at least once.  The Web The Internet is central to most things I do in education. It's a subject I teach, it's a research hub for myself and students, its a source of a wealth of material. My childhood took place just before the rise of the Web so I have this position where I remember what the world was like before (more innocent, I'd say) but still having become part of the Internet generation. Nobody I teach any more remembers a time before the Int...

We covered a bit about formulas and conditional formatting today. I'm not going to talk about that. Instead I'll tell you about the most ridiculous Excel project I've ever worked on. It's one of the reasons why I tend to adopt a 'less is more' mantra. It's also why I know a lot of this stuff in the first place. Many years ago, before working in higher education had ever occurred to me as a possibility, I did some temping work at British Rail to help pay for uni. I was based in an office above a terminus station with just two other people - the boss, who despite carrying himself with an extremely strict, professional manner nevertheless had an obvious screaming fabulousness bubbling away just under the surface, kept under a tight wrap presumably until the weekends hit, and his shy and efficient PA who was very meticulous about the tea area.

Over the last few posts I've discussed a couple of the most important MS Office applications from an education perspective. PowerPoint and Word are two dominant weapons in my preppin' holster and I rely on them daily. Of course Office is much more than two pieces of software, so I thought I'd go through some of them briefly here. Excel When it comes to spreadsheets, Excel is the undisputed market leader. It's got the users of course ( Office 2010 broke the billion user mark  some time ago), but it's also known as a powerhouse of software used by nearly every market sector. That includes a whole lot of using it for the wrong purpose (which seems to be a trend with the whole suite), most classically as a database when Access is readily available (I'm guilty of this myself). I use Excel to track students' attendance and performance, budget for orders and other administrative tasks. I've never used it in teaching and unless I start teaching accounta...

As much as PowerPoint remains top of the pile when it comes to presentation apps the rest of the MS Office suite is also heavily utilised in education. Word is of course the most commonly used one by a long shot. Most types of document we work with are Word files, from assignment briefs to the reams of redundant, badly designed templates handed down as gospel. The overarching problem with Word isn't so much Word itself - as a document layout application it's pretty good. It has a huge range of features (so long as you can find them) and is capable of creating very tight, nicely designed documents. Its templating system has had quite the overhaul over the last couple of releases and can deal with all sorts of forms, hand-outs and official red-tape stuff. It also has a good built-in system for dealing with referencing and automating various tasks. What sucks about Word is that everyone tries to use it for things it was not meant to do. The thing is, Word can do a LOT of th...

I've been teaching now for almost a decade, a large portion of which has included some form of presentation (usually a PowerPoint) as a core element of delivery. I've never really given too much thought into the specific reasons why and how I use PowerPoint, I've just considered it a convenient way to organize topics and structure a lecture. It's probably time to look more closely. My own exposure to PowerPoint has mostly come from student presentations, the quality of which I shall be positive about and call 'variable'. I've also bumped into it with the brief stints of employment I've had in business offices, as another media type to deal with doing AV support at corporate events, and whenever a speaker has used it at a conference I've attended or viewed on-line. I've experienced very little in the way of PowerPoint teaching, going through school as I did before the software was quite so ingrained (although I am now getting plenty of it for my...

We had a look at a few alternative tools to create slide presentations. Powerpoint is by far the most well known, but we also looked at Prezi and one I hadn't seen called Nearpod. MS Powerpoint www.office.com/powerpoint Powerpoint is Microsoft's ubiquitous and long-established presentation application. It's by far the most feature-rich of all the tools out there, but that comes at the expense of accessibility, with many functions untouched and unknown about by most users. MS have tried to alleviate this in recent versions with their 'ribbon' interface, but the fact remains most people only scratch the surface of what this software can do. Until recently Powerpoint was a solely paid-for package, but in recent times Microsoft have made multiple entry points, from the full-blown commercial offering to free versions with reduced (but still compelling) functionality. It's now available on pretty much every platform out there, including mobile and the web. Power...