17/8/10

Google maps-
I found this application to be interesting and engaging to students, History and Geography students would have a really good time at using this for there assignments to give more depth to distriptive mapping of past events and comparison to today's image. As for its application with real topics like Woodwork and Metal work, not so much of a good instructional tool. In saying that though, for a Graphics project a teacher could use it to illustrate how certain drafting techniques taught in class where used in buliding structures like the Eiffel tower, London Bridge, the Great wall of China, showing photos of the past and then looking at Google maps of the structures today. Interesting to say the least, but not a program that I will be using to often in a classroom.

Microsoft Word: -
Word is a program already used widely through out all schools. It is the basis for most projects and assignments. All teaching staff will have used this program and should be able to teach students how to use it successfully and the teachers should be able to successfully teach using word as well.
Word is a very good program for writing essays, stories, list, brian storming, it is able to count the words, paragraphs or spaces, it has a automatic spell check and a number of fonts and bullet settings and many more good features. Disadvantages of students using word. If they are not confident at using word, they could waste hours of time trying to recover paragraph styles, or spacing. If they do not save their work often enough during the writing process they could lose all their hard work if the computer crashes. Because of the spell checker they may become lazy at spelling.



Microsoft Excel:-
This is a very versatile program and can be used for nearly ever subject studied. While the benefits of this program and the uses are endless, so are there many issues with encouraging the use of Excel. It is a complex program and takes a long time of using to master, it can be difficult to teach to students, students can waste a lot of time trying to get the forula functions to work, the filter functions, the auto sum, these make excel great for Math, Business, Science and even Man arts and home ec. If the teacher knows how to use Excel, I strongly encourage them to show their students how it can benefit them.