About this site

Current electronic spreadsheet software products, such as Microsoft Excel, have a number of powerful capabilities that largely go untapped by classroom teachers and principals. Spreadsheet tools such as sorting, filtering, conditional formatting, graphing, and pivot tables can easily be taught to educators and can empower their ability to analyze raw data instead of being dependent on preformatted reports from states and/or testing companies. Most educators, however, have little familiarity with even basic spreadsheet capabilities, much less the more-advanced functions that are useful for data analysis.

The self-paced electronic tutorials on this web site are intended to help educators learn many of the spreadsheet tools that are useful for analyzing raw student data. These tutorials utilize customized, school-oriented training files to teach essential concepts in a way that is accessible to busy educators nationwide. Not only are the tutorials short and focused on K-12 school data issues, they also can be viewed repeatedly until educators have mastered the skills being taught [did we mention they're also free?].

Although not every educator needs to have the skills addressed by these tutorials, every school organization needs to have a critical mass of personnel who can work with raw data and provide assistanceand/or data analysesto other staff. If educators are to truly realize the power of data-driven decision-making, these "data managers" should be in every school building, not just the district central office. This is true even in school districts that already have a comprehensive data management and analysis (i.e., data warehouse) or instructional management and assessment system, since educators in those districts often find that they still have a need to work with raw data outside of those software systems. Of course these advanced spreadsheet tools are especially important for those school districts that cannot afford comprehensive data systems from corporate vendors.

The tutorials on this web site have been field tested by students in our data-driven decision-making classes at the University of Minnesota; hundreds of educators across Minnesota, Illinois, and the rest of the country; and the CASTLE staff. We hope that you find these tutorials as useful as they have. Please let us know how we can improve this resource for you.