How Excel could be incorporated into the curriculum....

Wow, that title is a mouthfull! Using Excel spreadsheets in the classroom for special needs is the issue at hand. I know that teachers of special needs have a lot of paperwork to keep track of.
  1.  When IEPs are due, other appoinrments the students have while at school, such as therapists, are calendar items that could benefit from spreadsheets. This would definitely help with organization in the classroom!
 2.   Another use is keeping track of behaviors for behavior programs. How often does a particular student refuse to do work, or twitch in that certain way??
3. A third use for the teachers is to keep track of data such as how accurate the skills of their students are in a certain area. When an objective is for the student to perform a task 4 out of 5 times, a spreadsheet could help put that all together. I think that an administrator would be impressed that doecmentation could be achieved efficiently, giving the teacher more time to actually spend with the students!
4. The students could use Excel in their learning, by making easy to interpret visual graphs of data that interests them. For instance, how many of their classmates like the same movie as them, or song? These questions could be matched to content areas like science, social studies, math, and even music class.
5. The students could be taught how to be organized with their data and this might help them the rest of their lives. If only I had learned to be organized, and put assignments on a spreadsheet, maybe I wouldn't be up past a reasonable bedtime finishing this assignment!
I do hope that this illustrates how Excel could  be helpful and useful in the curriculum, helping teachers and students in their tasks!

As far as the other question goes, about whether I vote for Microsoft Word and Excel or Googledocs, I think that for my purposes as a special educator, Googledocs gets my vote. For one thing, Google spreadsheets seemed like a simpler tool to use. It is more the "point and shoot" approach than the more compicated Excel program. So many choices aren't necessarily a good thing to a beginner! "You can do this, and that, and this and that, if you go here and click on that.......blah blah blah" It all blends into a gibberish and the eyes glaze over......
    I like the idea of sharing with Googledocs and also the editing possibilities, in a structured and measured way. The students would enjoy getting feedback and the more concrete everything is, the better off they are!