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Using real school data to teach students charts and graphs (article)

Using real school data to teach students charts and graphs (article)

Looking for a practical and fun way to teach students how to understand and apply charts and graphs? Use Microsoft® Office Excel® to tally real data from your classroom or school and present it in charts and graphs.

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Overview

Use Microsoft® Office Excel® to tally real data from your classroom or school and present it in fun charts and graphs.

Using real school data to teach students charts and graphs

Lesson information

How-to article
Item Requirements
Instructional level
  • Intermediate user
School level
  • Elementary school (5–11 years)
  • Middle school (11–15 years)
Curriculum areas
  • Mathematics—charts and graphs
  • Thinking and reasoning
  • Technology
  • Work skills
Academic standards
  • Understand and apply graphing concepts
ISTE NETS Standards
  • Use technology tools to enhance learning, increase productivity, and promote creativity.
Software required
  • Microsoft Office Excel

Objective

Use Microsoft Office Excel to tally real data from your classroom or school and teach students how to understand charts and graphs and apply them. Here's how:

Create charts and graphs from classroom data

  1. Have the students create a short survey for the other classrooms in your school. The survey may include questions, such as:
  • What do you eat for lunch?
  • What time do you go to bed?
  • How tall are you?
  • What is your favorite subject?
  • How do you get to school?
  1. Open Microsoft Office Excel, and then open a new spreadsheet.
  2. Enter the collected data.
  3. Students will use Excel to tally the data from the survey.
  4. Once the data are tallied, students can use graphs to best represent their data.

Templates you may find useful for this project

School information survey (20 KB Microsoft Word file)

Data entry form (36 KB Microsoft Excel file)

This content is reprinted with permission from Microsoft. For additional content, please visit http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.mspx.