Computer Applications: Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Presentations

The Computer Applications units put a working word processor, spreadsheet and slide editor inside the lesson window. A student builds a real document while the lesson sets the task and checks the result. This article says where the three units are, what a lesson looks like, how the checking works, and what each unit covers.

All three units, Word Processing, Spreadsheets and Presentations, require PLUS, and each carries a gold crown in the curriculum rail to say so. Word Processing and Spreadsheets run from 3rd Grade to 12th Grade and Adult Learner; Presentations starts a year earlier, at 2nd Grade.

Word Processing and Spreadsheets sit under the Computer Applications heading in the curriculum rail, and Presentations is the third of the group, further down the same rail. A film sits on the overview card at the head of the Word Processing lesson list, and is on YouTube as Computer Applications.

2nd Grade packages the material differently. A three-lesson unit called Computer Applications in the Beyond Typing group covers Writing and Formatting a Paragraph, Fixing Up My Writing, and All About Me, One Slide.

A lesson opens either straight into the application or on a short setup screen that Continue clears. Either way the application runs in the same browser tab: nothing is downloaded, nothing is installed, and no Google or Microsoft account is involved.

Word Processing opens a document editor with File, Edit, Insert, Format and Tools menus, a full formatting toolbar, and a document that already holds a title and a paragraph to work on.

Spreadsheets opens a grid with a cell reference box, an fx formula bar, currency, percent and decimal controls, and chart, filter and sum buttons, with the lesson's data already entered.

Presentations opens a slide editor with a slide sorter down the left, a speaker notes strip along the foot, Background, Layout, Theme and Transition controls, and a Present button.

Beside the document, every screen carries a card holding a YOUR TASK panel with the steps to follow, a Show me how link that demonstrates them, and a Check My Work button. The 5th Grade Word Processing lesson Inserting and Arranging Images, for instance, asks the student to click anywhere on the page, click the Insert Image button in the toolbar, and insert any image.

Check My Work is what does the automatic grading. A lesson runs its teaching screens first and finishes with an assessment screen the student completes on their own.

The units grow with the grade. Word Processing runs from 4 lessons at 3rd Grade to 29 at 12th Grade and Adult Learner, Spreadsheets from 4 to 29, and Presentations from 3 to 21. At 5th Grade they cover:

• Word Processing (14 lessons) - writing and formatting a paragraph, inserting and arranging images, editing text, copy, cut and paste, bulleted and numbered lists, page layout and margins, find and replace, outlines, tables, a table of contents, and revising with comments.

• Spreadsheets (10 lessons) - entering data, cell references and simple formulas, data types, creating charts, sorting, answering a question with a spreadsheet, choosing the right chart, and the SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MAX and MIN functions.

• Presentations (9 lessons) - building a multi-slide deck, changing how slides look, adding multimedia, organizing for an audience, slide design, telling a story across slides, adding charts and data, and presenting to different audiences.

Each unit has its own box on the Lessons tab of Class Settings, so you can switch a whole unit off for a class, or expand it and switch off lessons one at a time. Hide Specific Content and Lessons has the steps.

Typing.com sets all three units out lesson by lesson, grade by grade, with the standards they are aligned to, on the Computer Applications curriculum page. In the Teacher Portal, Curriculum in the left-hand menu opens the same lessons for the curriculum a class is on.

Pro-Tip: every lesson row carries a Preview button that opens the lesson exactly as a student sees it, the editor included, so you can try a task before you set it. Nothing done in a preview is recorded against a student.