Computer lab (non-virtual)
The goal of the lesson – to get know the financial management methods and to develop practical skills for creating the project budget in Google spreadsheet environment.
Content for tagging and the exercises for solving:
text about the cost planning
text about the budget
exercise about creating the budget
text about the cash flow table and the S-chart
teamwork about creation of the project budget.
The exercise was individual task. It contains different incomes and the outcomes of one fake person in unsorted way. Students’ task was to separate incomes and outcomes, input them with quantity and price figures into table and calculate totals and earning. The structure of table was presented as picture. The earning in the budget was negative. Students had to reduce outcomes to find balance between incomes and outcomes. The goal of the last action was to explain the importance of equations in budget table and to control the existence of computer based calculations.
The environment for budget creation was Google Spreadsheet but some of the students preferred MS Excel. I asked them tu publish the results in Google in any case. During the copying the content from Excel to Google the equations were lost. Only the answers were copied.
I did not haw much time to practice the features of Google Spreadsheet. I had to improvise during the lesson. Students need lot of help because they are not familiar with spreadsheet calculation.
The creation of the project budget was teamwork. One team finished before the end of the lesson. One finished on time and the team of the graduation ceremony project staid for longer.
During the lesson students started to watch pictures in the RATE portal. I tried to keep them on right track but some of them sill preferred not to work. I was tied and students were reckless.
The result of tagging was normal – 13 students were presented, 9 of them tagged the content and 6 of them tagged OK. 10 students out of 13 finished and published the personal budget (individual exercise) in Google. 2 teams out of 3 published the project budget (teamwork). Surprisingly the team who finished before others did not published the budget.
Comment – the budget was missing even in the final plan.
Overall rate to lesson – 4 because I felt my self uncomfortable in Google Spreadsheet.
