ICT Teaching of excel

[Catriona100]

I was checking DS's maths homework last night and decided to use excel to make it faster. DS was watching over my shoulder and he was astonished to find out that you can do calculations on excel!

It turns out that he "has done excel" in ICT at school, but all he did was fill up various cells with Xs according to the teachers instructions, in order to make a picture.

He has no idea that it has maths functions, charting functions and database functions.

I wasn't expecting that his primary would teach him to be an expert, but would it have killed them to teach him how to add to cells together?

That's funny. Apparently there is a programming language available for children too. Do you think they should be writing anti-virus software?

I think you either teach them what excel is for or leave it alone rather than giving the false impression that it is for making pictures.

Why don't you tell them what you think? Maybe the teachers don't know how to use it.

It's usually on the curriculum for Y5.

Spreadsheets, that is- using any suitable software available, not necessarily Excel.

Feenie - are there any guidelines for what children are taught when introduced to speadsheets?

FWIW I am amused rather than appalled that excel was used in this way. Maybe the person teaching it (not the class teacher BTW) is really a frustrated artistic who has taken up ICT teaching for some money?

artist not artistic... don't know what's happened to my typing today!

My son (y4) has 'done Excel'! They were tought to create bar charts and basic graphs from a set of data, add legends, etc.