3 Ways that MS Excel Courses Can Drastically Improve Productivity for Teachers by Christine Harrell

Due to shrinking budgets and rising standards, today's teachers are expected to handle more work and responsibility than ever before. In order to shoulder the burden most teachers spend long hours after the bell rings recording grades, documenting attendance records, and cataloguing other information that is critical for assessing grade reports. These are tasks that can be drastically streamlined by applying techniques offered in MS Excel courses.

Because teachers spend so much time and energy teaching others, they rarely have time left over to learn new technologies that can make their own jobs easier and free up more of their time. The good news is that even two days of MS Excel courses can eliminate countless hours that teachers spend on busy work each year. If you're not currently using the powerful spreadsheet program in the classroom, you may be wondering how MS Excel courses can help. In this article, we'll take a look at just a few ways that teachers are using Excel in the classroom.

Calculating Grades
Calculating grades on paper and by calculator can be cumbersome, tricky, and just plain frustrating. Most end of period grades are a combination of many different variables, each with a weighted percentage. For example, homework grades may count for only 20% of a grade's weight while test grades may count toward 40%. In MS Excel courses, you'll learn how to write formulas that instantly calculate grades based on any number of different weighted variables.

Taking a few minutes at the beginning of the grading period to create one formula explained in intermediate level MS Excel courses can literally shave hours off of the process of figuring grades at the end of the grading period. Each day when tests or homework is scored, simply enter the grade into your Excel sheet and you'll have an up-to-the-minute final grade throughout the school year.

Tallying attendance and participation
In addition to documenting grades, teachers are also responsible for tallying the number of attendance days, class participation, and the number of days students handed in homework. In MS Excel courses, you'll learn about the "=countA" formula which instantly adds the number of occurrences within a cell range, rather than calculating the value inside of the cells.

Instead of hand counting and recounting checkmarks on an attendance or homework roster every grading period, this one Excel formula does the work for you. After a few Excel courses, you'll learn how to instantly get a total of number of occurrences for any variable during any grading period using just one simple formula.

Keeping track of student information
During school hours, a teacher is a student's guardian. And for every student, there is a great deal of information that may need to be accessed quickly. Information such as guardian names, home phone numbers, medical information, whether or not the student has returned a permission slip for tomorrow's field trip and who to call to get a faxed and signed copy of it before the field trip begins.

Suppose one student regularly travels between 2 parent households. Teachers can't be expected to remember which parent to release the child to on a particular day, but an Excel spreadsheet can do this effortlessly. In MS Excel courses, teachers will learn how to create lists that can hold almost limitless amounts of organised data along with how to sort and filter those lists for easy access to the data.

If you're a school principal, consider enrolling your teachers and teacher's aids in MS Excel courses to help them discover new ways to streamline their daily, weekly and monthly tasks. This helps teachers spend more time teaching and less time handling paperwork while also freeing up some much needed hours or personal time.

Author Resource: Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information on MS Excel courses, visit www.MicrosoftTraining.net.

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