Office software

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Read at home,
talk in class

ARTICLE: https://eslbrains.com/crc085

LESSON OVERVIEW

The main objectives of this lesson are to:

  • read an article about the Microsoft Excel World Championship;
  • talk about office software and its use;
  • describe tasks done with spreadsheets, word processors and presentation tools.

With this lesson, students discuss office software and work tasks, talk about spreadsheet skills and practise collocations related to office software (e.g. manage projects, insert tables, edit lists). They also share experiences using software at work, discuss word processors and presentation tools and express their preferences for workplace software.

B1 / Intermediate45 minCritical Reading ClubUnlimited Plan

This is a Critical Reading Club worksheet. With this format, students need to read an online article at home and do the exercises in the classroom. Learn more about how to use such worksheets and their benefits in our post.

ACTIVITIES

This lesson starts with a warm-up where students name examples of software from different categories (spreadsheets, word processors and presentation software). Afterwards, they use phrases related to Excel skills and competitions (e.g. great at using spreadsheets, compete in online battles) to say what they remember from the article. Following that, students discuss questions about spreadsheets and their uses. They then match halves to create sentences about planning and organizing work tasks (e.g. Our customers have to understand trends, so we use data to create charts and graphs for them.). After that, students look at the tasks again. They share details about the tasks they have done, haven’t done, find easy or difficult, and those they can’t do without using a spreadsheet.  Students do various tasks (e.g. brainstorm software for workplace scenarios, share their experiences with office software) and use the collocations from the lesson. Finally, they look at pairs of tools (e.g. an AI writing assistant that helps users improve grammar and clarity of texts OR an AI assistant that joins meetings, takes notes and creates to-do lists for teams) and say which one they would prefer to use, and why so.  

ARTICLE

https://eslbrains.com/crc085

WORKSHEETS

Comments

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Leave a Reply

  1. BTLTEACH

    Excellent materials!

    1. Ewa

      Thanks 🙂

  2. YuliaPetrunina

    Unfortunately, there is no access to the article.

    1. Ewa

      Hi Yulia! The article is on the BBC website which is generally open access. Alternatively, you can read the article here or here.

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