Artifact 10

In an internship I completed in my final year at Appalachian State University, I worked in a third grade class at Mabel Elementary School. My classroom had two computers and various software available for students to use. During this time, I worked with a particular software program, Cruncher 2.0, and developed an evaluation of it. After evaluating and learning about this software program, I saw and participated in its practical use by teaching my students how to create spreadsheets and graphs with it.

This evaluation and the software itself will be used in my own classroom. I will be able to help my children create their own spreadsheets and graphs though the Cruncher 2.0 program. The lesson plan that corresponds to the software will help my students see how helpful spreadsheets and graphs can be in recording and representing data. I now know how to properly evaluate other software as it crosses my desk and see the importance of the software’s ability to deepen students’ understanding of specific material addressed. Through this software evaluation, I will now be able to judge software quality accurately.

This artifact evaluates software as a learning resource for student use. The software evaluation also enhances the students’ understanding of spreadsheets and graphs while it meets the individual learning styles and needs of each child (13.1). The software being evaluated is a tool that is specific to organizing and presenting data (11.3). Cruncher 2.0 supports learning for children with special needs through its tutorial lessons and step by step instructions (13.2). It also reinforces skills taught to the students in their math class. Finally, my software evaluation enabled me to utilize a computer in gathering, organizing, and presenting information through the spreadsheets the students recorded their data in and the graph they created with those spreadsheets. With this evaluation, I created a lesson to facilitate the use of the software to create a spreadsheet and graph (11.1). This allowed me to assess the students’ computer skills and their understanding of a specific math concept (10.5).