Spreadsheet Races

It would be nice if I could say that I planned all this but in fact I stumbled across this idea when teaching spreadsheets. First, I must explain the background.

When learning about spreadsheets I have found that some students wasted significant time scrolling down to see how far the numbers went. I would often tell them to try it at home rather than doing it in class, but it never worked. Curiosity was too strong and then they wanted to have races to see whose computer could do it faster.

This time I tried a different approach. I told them we would all have a race. I was going to use the GOTO command to jump to the last row and beat them all because I knew most of them would just use the down arrow key. I was a little surprised when 3 boys beat me and finished in about 1 second. I asked them to tell the class how they got there so fast. They had used control-down arrow which of course is even quicker than the GOTO command. We had a brief discussion about alternative ways to move around in Excel and moved on.

So far I haven’t seen anyone scrolling up and down for minutes at a time, so it looks like I achieved my goal and the students still had their fun. Now I need to find more fun ways to help them keep learning.

How Do I Find Time For All This?

We want our students to become life-long learners but are we life-long learners ourselves? We faithfully attend the in-service sessions the school organises. We keep up with our first-aid certification and when there is a new syllabus, we go to the seminars organized by the QSA. Does that make us life-long learners? What if we are approaching retirement, do we need to keep learning?

The draft Continuing Professional Development Framework from the Queensland College of Teachers indicates a requirement for 30 hours of professional development per year. Will this make us life-long learners? Is this even the right question to ask?

Belshaw (2006) asks a more appropriate question in his blog post, Infectious Learning: Teachers as Lifelong Learners. “Why should teachers also be learners? Well first and foremost, teachers are role models. If we as teachers aren’t interested and intrinsically motivated by the learning process, why should we expect our students to be?”

Whether we agree with this philosophically or just recognize that legislation demands this of us, we as teachers need to become life-learners. So how does an already busy teacher find time for all this?

One way that works for me is to listen to podcasts about topics in my area of professional interest. They are available free and I can listen while I am commuting, so it does not “cost” me extra time, although it does require a little time finding, downloading and transferring podcasts to my iPod. For more information on podcasts see PD on the Move.

Podcasts will not provide for all your PD needs, but they can provide lots of ideas for further investigation and point you to other web based resources for more in-depth PD. Many conferences for teachers are now being recorded and made available on the web. Education Network Australia (EDNA) is a good place to start looking.

There is no denying it. PD does take time. We will still need to attend seminars and workshops at times but we really need to dedicate a regular portion of time each week for your own PD. After all, we are aiming become life long learners.