University of South Florida

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South Florida

FUNDAMENTALS OF INFORMATION The Modernization of Digital Information

TECHNOLOGY: Textbook – English Technology

1-1-2023

Chapter 07 Productivity Applications

Shambhavi Roy

Clinton Daniel
University of South Florida, [email protected]

Manish Agrawal
University of South Florida, [email protected]

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/dit_tb_eng

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Productivity Applications

CHAPTER CONTENTS
Overview 114
What Are Productivity Applications? 114
Documents 115
Portable Document Format (PDF) 116
Spreadsheets 117
Presentations 120
Email 121
Calendar 122
Web Conferencing 123
Chat 125
Office 365 and Google Suite 126
Bundling 126
Chapter Terms and Definitions 128
Chapter Case: A Teacher’s Work in Never Done 129

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 113

 If we want America to stay on the cutting edge, we need young Americans to master
the tools and technology that will change the way we do just about everything.

—Barack Obama, former President of the United States

Overview
In the chapters so far, we have talked about different types of computers and the important components
of computers. We are now ready to introduce how these computers are used. Though computers were
created to perform complex calculations such as the correct angle to position a gun to hit a specific
target and to find the correct trajectory to return safely to earth from the moon, most users do not
have such exotic uses for computers. Most folks own computers to work on assignments, prepare
reports, calculate business profits, communicate with collaborators, or even just for entertainment,
such as listening to music, watching videos, or playing games. In the next set of chapters, we will
provide an overview of the most common categories of computer applications used in business.
These applications help you create and process information and are called productivity applications.
They include word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, and communication utilities such as
email.

What Are Productivity Applications?

Productivity applications are to information workers like what tools are to the skilled trades. If
you have ever watched plumbers, carpenters, or electricians at work, you might have noticed one
common thing about all of them: their collections of tools. They must be extremely familiar with their
tools to be good at what they do. They often reach for the right tool in their pocket without even
looking. When they see a problem, they know exactly which tool to reach for and how to use it. They
are so dependent on their toolset, that they carry backups of their core tools in their trucks. The best
carpenter is useless without a saw, hammer, and drill. The best plumber in the world can’t fix a leak
without a wrench at hand.
Productivity applications play a similar role in the world of information. Productivity applications on
computers enable users to create, process, and distribute information across the world. The Internet,
computers, and productivity applications enable groups of widely dispersed individuals to share
information seamlessly. You could have team members spread across the globe in different time
zones, working on different parts of the same document simultaneously.
Productivity applications have enabled the globally connected world we live in and benefit from
every day. The car you are driving today was probably designed in California, manufactured in
Japan, shipped to a port in Mexico, and delivered to a dealership in Florida. This distributed design,
manufacturing, shipping, retail, and sales was made possible because of productivity applications
that let different companies and teams share information in a seamless way. Every aspect of our
lives, from healthcare, to banking, to housing, to food, to entertainment, is possible because millions
of people around the world can work with each other using documents, spreadsheets, databases,
emails, calendars, and chat applications. To participate in this ecosystem, to create a document, build
a database of expenses, make a presentation, send an invoice to a vendor, meet a customer, or quickly
ask a colleague a question, you need to know which tool to reach for and how to use it. The next few
chapters will introduce you to all the commonly used tools in the business workplace.

114 Chapter 7—Productivity Applications

Documents
The basic information product is a digital document. A digital document is a collection of text and
images organized meaningfully. Whether you receive a college admission letter, your semester report
card, or the sale deed of a car, and regardless of whether you receive it in printed form in the mail or
in electronic form online, likely it was generated and stored as a digital document using one of the
productivity applications we will discuss. This textbook also exists as a digital document, albeit a very
large one, and broken into many parts.
Working with digital documents is probably the simplest use of computers. Productivity applications
that are used to create digital documents
are called word processors. The two most
popular word processing productivity
applications are Microsoft Word80 and
Google Docs.81 Microsoft Word, or just
Word, is the more traditional word
processing software and is typically used
by enterprises. Word documents are
identified by the .doc or .docx extension.
Any computer that has Microsoft Word (MS
Word) or a compatible application will let
you open and work on Word documents.
Google Docs on the other hand is browser A simple Word document.
based and designed with a focus on
collaboration. Multiple team members can work on different sections of a Google Docs document at
the same time. In recent years, MS Word has also become available in a browser-based version with
comparable collaboration capabilities as part of the Office 365 set of productivity applications.

Google docs ribbon.

Word processors are simple to use, but most users only use the most basic capabilities. With just
a little bit of effort and instruction, you can leverage the powerful capabilities of word processors
such as fonts, paragraphs, lists, numbering, styles, sections, layouts, tables, pictures, colors, headers,
footers, and templates. These are built into all modern word processors to easily create beautiful
documents with a consistent look and feel. You can easily highlight critical bits of information and
improve readability by formatting paragraphs and sections with ease.

80 Microsoft 365 home page, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/word (accessed

June 2023).
81 Google Docs home page, https://www.google.com/docs/about/ (accessed June 2023).

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 115

 Documents and Microsoft
In 2021, Microsoft’s operating income was $83bn.82 Of these profits, $29.7bn
came from the “Productivity and Business Processes” segment, which includes
Office 365. Microsoft got its start in productivity applications with word
processing when Charles Simonyi joined Microsoft in 1981. Simonyi had
developed the Bravo WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor at Xerox
PARC labs. Simonyi started the productivity applications group at Microsoft,
which has remained one of the most successful software groups of all time. In
an interview in 2020, the 70-year-old billionaire said that he is currently working
on the Microsoft Whiteboard productivity application and goes to work every
day.
In the programming world, Simonyi is known for developing the Hungarian
notation83 for naming computer program elements such as variables and
functions.84

Portable Document Format (PDF)

The ease of editing is one of the primary motivations to use digital documents. However, there are
times when you want to send a document to others who are not authorized to modify it. For example,
when you return a purchased item to Amazon, they give you a shipping label with a special barcode.
Amazon doesn’t want you to modify the shipping label because it has a special barcode that helps
Amazon identify the item and correctly process the return to issue a refund. Therefore, shipping
labels are read-only documents. For correct handling, these documents should have the same form
regardless of the printer and the operating system used. To accomplish the above task, you can save
documents in a format known as the “Portable Document Format,” or PDF.
Most forms including college applications, loan forms, tax forms, and club membership forms are
distributed in the PDF format. Word processors such as Microsoft Word and Google Documents can
save documents in the PDF format. In most applications, the simplest way to create a PDF version of
the document is to print the document and select Adobe PDF as the printer.
The most popular application to view PDF documents is Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software,85 which is
available for most operating systems.

82 Trended Historical Financials, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/trended/

yearly-income-statements.aspx (accessed June 2023).
83 A great article for the motivation of the Hungarian notation, with generalizable ideas for many
life contexts. Joel Spolsky, “Making Wrong Code Look Wrong,” https://www.joelonsoftware.
com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-look-wrong/ (accessed June 2023).
84 Charles Simonyi, “Hungarian Notation,” https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/
visualstudio/visual-studio-6.0/aa260976(v=vs.60)?redirectedfrom=MSDN (accessed June 2023).
85 Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded from here, https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/pdf-
reader.html (accessed June 2023).

116 Chapter 7—Productivity Applications

 “View and Print Anywhere” Motivation for PDF86
The portable document format was created in 1993 by a team led by John
Warnock, a co-founder of Adobe, one of the world’s leading software companies.
The challenge at the time was to create a simple format that would look the same
on any display, printer, etc., and demand minimal computer processing power.
In 2008, Adobe opened up the specifications to the International Organization
for Standards (ISO). Since then, most computer applications have introduced
the option to save their output as PDF.

Spreadsheets
A spreadsheet is a specialized digital document in which data is arranged in rows and columns for use
in business calculations. Imagine if you maintained your expenses in a notebook on pen and paper.
If you accidentally entered a wrong number, you would have to redo all calculations to find your
current balance. If you wanted to find the value of expenses in a different currency, you would have to
change every number in the list individually. Every time the currency rate changed; you would have
to redo the calculations.
Spreadsheets simplify and even automate these and similar tasks, so users can focus on their business
problem, not on the calculations. Spreadsheets not only give you predefined formulas to use for
calculations, but also allow you to create your own formulas. If you change the input values, the
output is recalculated automatically. Similarly, the output data will change if you change the formulas.
As an example of the convenience of using spreadsheets, Figure 54 is a home mortgage calculator.
You just input your initial loan amount, interest rate, and the loan start and end dates. The spreadsheet
automatically calculates your monthly payments based on predefined formulas. As you change your
input values, all the output values (monthly payments in this case) change automatically. This allows
you to focus on your home purchase options based on your budget, without worrying about the
calculations or their accuracy.

86 John Warnock (founder of Adobe), “Camelot,” https://web.archive.org/web/20090304134754/

http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/warnock_camelot.pdf (accessed June 2023).

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 117

 FIGURE 54 — Home Mortgage calculator.87

While spreadsheets are as simple to use as word processors, for proficient users, they can also be
the most technical of productivity applications to use. Advanced features such as Pivot Tables can
help you aggregate your data by different parameters and identify patterns. For example, would you
like to know whether the donations you collect for your school band come in on Sundays or from a
particular zip code? Pivot Tables can help you aggregate the data by days or locations and show you
totals for each category.
Spreadsheets are also great at filtering, sorting, and visualizing88 data. A common workflow you can
employ to present your business to stakeholders is to first capture your data in a spreadsheet, use the
spreadsheet software to create appropriate graphs to describe the data, and then use these graphs in
your documentations and presentations. Figure 55 shows an example.

87 The spreadsheet can be downloaded from https://templates.office.com/en-us/mortgage-loan-

calculator-tm02802352 (accessed June 2023).
88 For an overview of common chart types, please see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/
available-chart-types-in-office-a6187218-807e-4103-9e0a-27cdb19afb90 (accessed June 2023).

118 Chapter 7—Productivity Applications

 FIGURE 55 — Example spreadsheet graph.

Excel from Microsoft and Sheets from Google are the two leading spreadsheet productivity
applications used today. Almost every business uses spreadsheets. Likely, your school uses several
spreadsheets to keep track of students and their activities. It may not be an exaggeration to say that
while “America runs on Dunkin,”89 businesses run on spreadsheets. It is estimated that almost a billion
people use spreadsheets to manage data. Any time you are working with data at school, whether for
an assignment or for personal management, we highly recommend using spreadsheets and exploring
one new capability each time. This will help you not only manage your data more efficiently, but also
improve your own skills in one of the most important productivity applications.

VisiCalc and the Killer App90

A killer app (application) is a computer application that is so desirable that
it drives purchases of a much more expensive technology.91 VisiCalc, the first
popular spreadsheet software, is widely considered the world’s first killer app.
It was created in 1979 by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for Apple Computers
and sold for $100. However, it was so useful that users bought Apple Computers
costing over $2,000 just so they could use VisiCalc. Eventually, Lotus 1-2-3 from
IBM and then Excel from Microsoft became the dominant spreadsheets.

89 “Dunkin’ Donuts Launches New Advertising Campaign ‘America Runs on Dunkin’(sm),’” https://
news.dunkindonuts.com/news/dunkin-donuts-launches-new-advertising-campaign-america-
runs-on-dunkin-sm (accessed June 2023).
90 Luke Dormehl, “Today in Apple history: Apple II gets its first ‘killer app,’” https://www.cultofmac.
com/460680/apple-ii-killer-app-visicalc/ (accessed June 2023).
91 “Killer application,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_application (accessed June 2023).

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 119

Presentations
Presentations are digital documents that combine text, graphics, and media (audio and video) for
display to an audience. While documents are great at organizing detailed textual information and
spreadsheets are great at analyzing numerical data, neither of them is suited for presenting to a large
gathering. Documents and spreadsheets are largely designed to be viewed by individuals on their
own personal devices at their own personal pace.
Presentations on the other hand, are designed to
be viewed by a large audience at a pace set by the
speaker. Typically, a presenter provides additional
details about each slide during the presentation.
Therefore, presentations focus on holding
the viewer’s attention through visual appeal,
consistency, visual contrast, and other story-telling
elements.
Whether you want to present to management,
customers, or colleagues, you want to hold their
attention and get your message across. Microsoft
PowerPoint92 and Google Slides93 are the two most
popular presentation software applications today A slide presentation.
and can help you quickly put together slides that
look professional and convey information. Prezi94
is another popular presentation application, with
some unique presentation formats. A slide is a
single page of a presentation. Presentations are
also sometimes called slide decks because a stack
of printed slides look like a deck of large cards,
and the action of going through the slides in a
presentation is like going through cards in a deck.
In a typical presentation, one or more adjacent
slides convey one point to the audience. You
can embed summarized information from your
A standard presentation slide template that can be
analysis into the slides including images, graphs, customized to your needs.
and charts. As you move from one slide to the next
while presenting to an audience, you tell a story
that explains what’s on the slides. Slides transition seamlessly from one to the next, and you can make
content pop up on the screen to highlight important bits.95

92 PowerPoint home page, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/powerpoint

(accessed June 2023).
93 Google Slides home page, https://www.google.com/slides/about/ (accessed June 2023).
94 Prezi home page, https://prezi.com/ (accessed June 2023).
95 For a humorous take on common presentation mistakes, check out https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=MjcO2ExtHso (accessed June 2023).

120 Chapter 7—Productivity Applications

One great feature of PowerPoint is its ability to serve as an outline of ideas. When working on a complex
document for the first time, you can begin by organizing ideas in a presentation. The presentation
can then be saved in outline format (rtf ), which can be opened in a word processor. Next, content can
be populated within each outlined section and you can be assured that the ideas will flow smoothly
since they have already been organized in a logical sequence.
Modern presentation software creates beautiful slides by default. However, when presenters do not
make the effort to deliver an engaging presentation, it can get monotonous and tedious for the
audience. In business, this is seen as being subjected to a form of torture, particularly when successive
speakers deliver weak presentations. “Death by PowerPoint” is a colloquial term used to criticize
presentations that are so poorly planned or executed that they fail to effectively communicate their
ideas to the audience.96

PowerPoint Origins
Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin created PowerPoint for Apple computers in
1987.97 Microsoft bought their company within months of the software’s release.
Robert Gaskins maintains an excellent website describing PowerPoint’s origin
story,98 with several original design documents. Some documents are great
reads, including the first two-page concept proposal,99 and a more detailed
description.100

Email
Messages distributed electronically from one
computer user to one or more recipients and stored
on a central server are called electronic mail, or email
for short. Email was introduced in the 1970s and
soon became popular in universities and businesses.
Until email became widely available, documents
were saved in paper form and stored in locked
cabinets. Most large offices had systems like this.
To find a document and get it approved by others,
you had to go to the cabinet room, locate the file A physical filing repository.
in the correct cabinet, and walk with the file to the

96 This definition comes from chatGPT, https://chat.openai.com/chat (accessed June 2023).

97 “Microsoft PowerPoint,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_PowerPoint (accessed June
2023).
98 Robert Gaskins Home Page, https://www.robertgaskins.com/ (accessed June 2023).
99 Robert Gaskins, “Sample Product Proposal,” https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-
history/documents/gaskins-powerpoint-original-proposal-1984-aug-14.pdf (accessed June
2023).
100 Robert Gaskins, “Presenter,” https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/documents/
gaskins-powerpoint-summary-and-review-1986-jul-15.pdf (accessed June 2023).

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 121

approvers to get them to sign on it. Email and related technologies have greatly simplified this process
now. In fact, it is often said that most forms now reside in users’ email.
Email enables you to put a message together easily, attach a file or two along with the message for
review or approval, and send the message to as many people as you like with the click of a button. The
people who receive your email can make changes to the document, if it is not read-only, and send the
document back to you as an attachment. In a matter of minutes, you can get your document approved
even if your approvers are thousands of miles away. Email helps you disseminate information in an
instant and magically overcome the limitations of the physical workspace and allows us to work as a
worldwide team.
Good email etiquette is simple to learn and a very useful skill to develop. There are several articles
online101 and most of them share similar ideas about email etiquette.102 Most people will form their
first impression of you from your introductory email. Being polite, using correct spelling and grammar,
using a pithy subject line, and staying brief are all likely to help people form the best impression
about you and make it more likely that they will take your requests sent over email seriously.
Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail are two popular email services.

Email as the Internet’s Killer App

We introduced spreadsheets as the killer app for personal computers. Email
has proven to be the killer app for the Internet.103 Email services are generally
free for personal users and relatively inexpensive for business users. However,
most users buy computers primarily to communicate using email. Though a lot
of personal information exchange has moved to instant messaging in recent
years, email continues to be the preferred mode of communication outside
close family and social circles.

Calendar
Calendars are charts that show how your time is organized by hours, days, weeks and larger units such
as months and years. Digital calendars leverage the capabilities of computers to simplify managing
your time and collaborating with people (Figure 56). If you want to meet friends for a movie, you
typically reach out to them and ask them if they are free to meet on a particular evening at a particular
location. This is an easy problem to solve if there are just a few people involved and there is no rush
or urgency to the task. Now imagine trying to meet groups of coworkers several times a day and
multiple days of the week to complete a critical project. Even if all your colleagues were right in front
of you, it would take a bit of time to find a slot that might work for everyone. You could spend all your

101 A good example is David Fallarme, “How to Write an Effective Email,” https://blog.hubspot.com/
marketing/email-writing-for-international-teams (accessed June 2023).
102 Jeff Su, “How to Write Better Emails at Work,” https://hbr.org/2021/08/how-to-write-better-
emails-at-work (accessed June 2023).
103 A nice article describing this phenomenon is Chris Preimesberger, “30 Years Ago: How Email
Rose to Become the No. 1 Killer App,” https://www.eweek.com/enterprise-apps/30-years-ago-
how-email-rose-to-become-the-no.-1-killer-app/ (accessed June 2023).

122 Chapter 7—Productivity Applications

time coordinating the meetings, if you did not have a calendaring software to solve the problem for
you.

FIGURE 56 — A user’s Outlook calendar showing free and busy periods.

Calendaring software helps you schedule meetings for specific times, create agendas for meetings,
and add the people you want to include from your list of contacts or the organization’s directory. You
can even book resources like rooms and projectors and clarify which attendees are required and who
are optional. As the software allows you to check when your colleagues are busy with other meetings
and when their calendar is free, folks are likely to accept your invitation if you find a good time when
everyone is free.
After you send the meeting invitation, the software will let you see who has accepted or rejected
the meeting invitation. The software also sends reminders of upcoming meetings, so people don’t
accidentally miss meetings.
Though the most popular calendars are Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Calendar, smartphones
also have fully functional calendar applications natively built into the operating system. These are
increasingly popular, particularly for personal use.

Web Conferencing
Web conferencing refers to any online interaction that approximates the information sharing
experience of an in-person meeting. The use of web conferencing was limited in business, until
the Covid pandemic. As we emerge from the Covid pandemic, web conferencing is the hero of the
moment, along with vaccines. Holed up in their homes, office workers were able to retain their jobs,
take care of their families, and meet family and friends, all thanks to web conferencing tools.

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 123

Web conferencing has been around in some form
since the introduction of webcams in the 1990.104
However, the covid pandemic and the resulting
isolation forced everyone to become familiar and
rapidly adopt this technology. The major vendors
in this technology—Zoom, Webex, BlueJeans, GoTo
Meeting, Teams, and Google Hangouts—offer similar
features including the ability to schedule meetings,
invite others, launch meetings, and allow others to join
using a URL. You can join the meeting on your phone
or use your computer’s microphone and speakers. If
you turn on your camera, you will be visible to other A web conference in progress.
meeting participants and be able to have face-to-face
conversations. Participants can share their screens and present information, just the way they would
in a conference room.
A very useful feature added recently to popular web conferencing software is the ability to record
meetings and share the recording with participants and those who may have missed the meeting.
Recordings can also be used to go over discussions that were not clear when presented at the meeting.
In the post-Covid world, most calendaring software
is also integrated with web conferencing software
such as Zoom and Teams to allow you to schedule
meetings. In most offices, it has become business as
usual (BAU) to “Schedule a Meeting” in calendaring
software such as Outlook and add Zoom or Teams
meeting details, including phone numbers, meeting
times, and meeting participants. The software sends
the meeting invite automatically and a meeting link
(Figure 57) can be used to email announcements.

FIGURE 57 — A typical meeting invitation in

Calendar.

104 For the origin story and its association to laziness, please see “The First Webcam Was Invented to
Check Coffee Levels Without Getting Up,” https://petapixel.com/2013/04/03/the-first-webcam-
was-invented-to-check-coffee-levels-without-getting-up/ (accessed June 2023).

124 Chapter 7—Productivity Applications

As an invitee, you can choose to “Accept/Reject” any invitation. You could also mark the invitation
“Tentative” if you are uncertain (Figure 58).

FIGURE 58 — Accepting/Rejecting a meeting invitation in Calendar.

Chat
Chat refers to real-time online communication. Online chat is very popular within family, friend and
social circles and has even gained popularity within business environments. If you use Facebook
Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Signal, or Telegram to stay in touch with family and friends, then
office chat apps will not be difficult for you to use. Chat capabilities are built into most web conferencing
applications. Slack and Microsoft Teams are the two most popular office chat apps that organizations
use to facilitate informal conversation between employees (Figure 59). A common feature of business
chat apps is building channels of communication with select teammates on a topic or a common
project. Through the channel, all team members interested in a topic or working on a project share
files, screenshots, and messages.
As the chat history is preserved, you and your team members can search through the history to find
something you discussed in the past or links you shared with each other. The generous use of emojis
and gifs makes chat a fun way to stay in touch with your team. Not surprisingly, for many businesses,
chat is increasingly popular, while email is increasingly used for more formal communications.
All popular chat apps now also offer mobile phone versions of their software, so you can seamlessly
jump from your computer to your phone and continue the conversation.

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 125

 FIGURE 59 — Slack is a popular chat application.

Office 365 and Google Suite

In the next few chapters, we will look at each of the productivity applications in more detail. Most
users typically pick one of the two sets of productivity applications—the Microsoft Office 365 Suite105
or the Google Workspace Suite.106 Apple also has a comparable set of productivity applications (Pages
for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets and Keynote for presentations). Each of these sets of
productivity applications have comparable capabilities for most users. The individual applications
(e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint) within a suite tightly integrate with each other, so users can copy and
paste information seamlessly from one application to the other, preserving formatting and other
details for ease of use. Often, the choice of office suite is made by the organization based on a number
of factors including pricing, features, etc.

Bundling
The distribution of productivity applications as a set of separate but tightly integrated applications is
called bundling. Applications within a bundle typically have similar user interfaces and mouse actions,
making it easy for users to transfer what they have learned from one application in the bundle to
another. Vendors offer strong discounts to customers who buy office suites as a bundle because it

105 Microsoft Officer 354 home page, https://www.office.com/ (accessed June 2023).
106 Google Workspace home page, https://workspace.google.com/ (accessed June 2023).

126 Chapter 7—Productivity Applications

reduces competition for their products. Once a user pays for a bundle, they are less likely to pay for
another bundle, or another individual application. This has therefore become a common practice in
the industry.

Chapter 7—Productivity Applications 127

 Chapter Terms and Definitions

Bundling: The distribution of productivity Portable Document Format (PDF): A digital

applications as a set of separate but tightly document format created for easy and reliable
integrated applications sharing of digital documents

Digital Calendar: A calendar accessed through Presentation: Digital documents that combine
a computing device such as a PC or smartphone text, graphics, and media (audio and video) for
display to an audience
Digital Document: A collection of text and
images organized meaningfully using a digital Productivity Application: Software applications
medium that help users create and process relevant
information
Email: Messages distributed electronically from
one computer user to one or more recipients and Spreadsheet: A specialized digital document in
stored on a central server which data is arranged in rows and columns for
use in business calculations
Email Etiquette: The utilization of accepted
standards and practices when communicating Web Conference: A meeting facilitated by
through email productivity applications that provide video
collaboration
Killer Application: A computer application that
is so desirable that it drives purchases of a much Word Processor: Software application designed
more expensive technology to aid the user in creating digital documents
focused on language and formatting
Online Chat: Real-time online communication
using an interface designed to send and receive
text

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 Chapter Case

A Teacher’s Work in Never Done

Teachers have to manage wide variety of tasks during their daily work lives to stay
productive at school. They are responsible for many different activities to ensure
students from various backgrounds and levels of literacy are educated in a safe
and productive environment. Teachers are very busy people and work hard to help
students succeed. Here is a list of some of the daily work activities your teachers are
responsible for:
· Develop, assign, and grade instructional content such as homework and
tests.
· Supervise students in the classroom to ensure they are learning in a safe
and productive environment.
· Organize the supplies and resources necessary for class lectures and
presentations.
· Plan educational activities and events.
· Ensure a clean and orderly classroom.
· Prepare and distribute progress reports and report cards.
· Schedule parent-teacher meetings.
A teacher’s work is never done….

Question 1: Take a close look at the list of daily work activities your teachers are
responsible for. List three types of applications that will help your
teachers be more productive. Explain why each application will help
your teachers be more productive with their daily work activities.
Question 2: If you were a school teacher, what type of work activity do you think
would be the most difficult? Now, describe how and what type of
application could help you improve the productivity of that difficult
task.

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