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October 2010, teaching Microsoft Excel with support from Google

Friday, October 8. At eleven o'clock we finished our weekly course on Microsoft Excel Advanced .
(In the picture beside a photograph of a screen Microsoft Excel 2003) .
Ten are students and I are the eleventh, the teacher. Twenty hours in five days, four hours a day, morning, from nine o'clock.
E 'a course in digital literacy , funded by the Province of Rome for their citizens and organized by Sediin Srl. What have we done

In five days we tested different functions and advanced formulas to Microsoft Excel . In support of this course, we used some Google applications.

Microsoft Excel Advanced

A course in "Excel Advanced" in a program of literacy may seem a contradiction in terms. And perhaps it is.
As noted at the end of the course almost all the students, Excel is very vast, complex and too complicated.
Twenty hours of lectures to learn the advanced features are few. One is left with the feeling of having done only a taste, but interesting part.
Here's the tasting menu:

• begins with a general review formulas and cell formats;
• order, search and replace of values \u200b\u200bwithin the spreadsheet
• database Excel, how to create them and how to use
• use data form (for some it was a repeat because they had already done in Excel basic level);
• automatic and custom filters;
• Pivot Tables ;
• advanced functions such as VLOOKUP and if ;
• conditional formatting and custom

Google Applications for the course

To support the activities of the course, we have used several free applications provided by Google:

GMail. It all begins with GMail. I invited the students to open a mailbox (account) with GMail. With these accounts I have created a mailing list for notices to students of the course. GMail is more than a mailbox. In fact, thanks to GMail, you can have access to additional features offered Google to team work, such as sharing documents online (see below).

Google Docs. To convey to students the files of the exercises, I used a shared folder Google Docs. The shared folder, thanks to a burst of creativity, has been termed "ExcelAvanzato. When served, I have uploaded new documents on the Internet as Excel files needed for classroom exercises and texts for the years of education at home. The students went on the Internet, to the shared folder, and from there downloaded the file to your desktop computer in the classroom. Some have also done their homework and I have sent a copy by mail.

Google Chrome. The Internet connection has had its ups and downs. For some students, using Microsoft Internet Explorer, the computer was very slow. So we tried to install the Google browser, Google Chrome, and the connection speed is increased.

Budget and opinions of the course students

At the end of the course, the students I met seemed to have learned to use new functions and procedures and Excel spreadsheets. It seems to me that they also managed to learn some functionality on which they had had some problems, such as use Pivot tables and the 'function if' nested.
is the opinion of students? I invited them to 'post' their comments to this article, with their views on the course and Google applications. I hope they do. ***