Lesson 2 Blog--Databases

As an English teacher, I am not naturally drawn toward the use of databases and spreadsheets. I am. however, keenly aware of their usefulness in the school environment. My tendency in the past has been to let my administrators and the "number crunching" faction of the staff deal with them. Well, I resolutely able to say that my previous aversion to spreadsheets and databases has been reduced by the materials I have come into contact with in my recent studies.

Today, I came across Greg Stiffler's Online Teaching Portfolio, where he demonstrates how he has used MS Access to create personalized letters using a template and a database. After entering all the needed contact information, the software automatically composes a letter with the student, parent, and address information plugged into the required field. Pretty cool! If you would like to check out Stiffler's page, it is at- http://tiger.towson.edu/~gstiff1/database.htm

I was reading chapter three of our textbook today as well. I happened upon a surprising use of a spreadsheet that might be readily applied in the classroom. The use is called, quite simply, the "what if?" function. Later on, I was able to suggest this use to a classmate on her discussion posting. Let me use her scenario to explain. Let's say that your class has determined that there is a significant correlation that can be established between class absence and lower student grades. For the safe of our discussion, we'll estimate that the difference is 1.2 percentage points for every day missed during a nine-week marking period. Using a spreadsheet, the students can instantly view the impact of missing four, six, or nine days of school by simply changing the field designated to indicate number of school days missed. Not bad!

Regardless of my general avoidance of spreadsheets in the past, I have used a program called, "Filemaker Pro" in the past. In our school district, Filemaker Pro was used to examine and retrieve student scores on the Language Arts Benchmark Test. I used the student information to ensure that my classroom instruction was specifically tailored to target the areas of most need for the particular group of students to be found in a particular class section. Also, I reviewed the second set of benchmark scores at the end of the year to assist in the recommendation process to English II.