Advice

I really enjoyed working in this class because I was not good with computers beforehand. I am still not great but since I paid attention in class and did all of my homework my computer skills definitely improved. So make sure to do all of your homework, pay attention in class, and just enjoy the material that you will be learning. Have a good year and always go to Professor Belisle for help because she will help as much as she can and she is a computer genius.

My Pic That Lies

I chose to do a picture representing Bear Grylls as a liar because he actually sleeps in hotels on his shows but he claims to sleep in the wild. I Made my picture that lies from a random picture I found of a hotel in a tropical area and then another picture of Bear Grylls in Ecuador. I used the hotel as my background and then cropped Bear out of his original picture and resized him to fit in the picture like he is walking away from the hotel. I also did a little bit of erasing and re-coloring to make the pictures flow together like it was real. I did this manipulation to try and prove the point that Bear Grylls is a phony. The manipulation was definitely harmful because it was intended to and does take away from Bear's credibility and it could potentially hurt his TV ratings. While I did purposely make this picture to harm Bear's image, I actually really like his show, I just thought it would be good for this project.

Favorite Blogs

I thought that everyone that presented yesterday did an excellent job so it was difficult to choose my favorite two, but since we have to I would say that my favorite two presentations were Trevor's and Ellee's. Both of their presentations shared several elements that stuck out to me. First of all, and most importantly for me, I could really relate to the information that they were presenting because I am interested in the same types of things. Along with their information that I liked, I really enjoyed the pictures that they used for their visuals. Trevor did a nice job of explaining subduction with different diagrams that would drop down and I really enjoyed that. Ellee had awesome background pictures that made you want to save the bees that she was talking about. Finally, both presenters obviously knew a lot about their fields of research and they were enthusiastic about presenting which is a key to a good presentation in my book.

Powerpoint Tips

The articles over powerpoint presentations were all very informative and interesting. They brought up many good points and in fact the articles were fairly redundant because they said such similar things. The top five tips I read in the readings and try to follow when I am doing my own presentations are: 1) Use visuals on the slides not words 2) Make your own backgrounds don't use the templates 3) Vary your styles or the kinds of things on each slide to keep your audience engaged (ex. imbed a video in a slide to hold your audiences attention) 4) Shy away from using transitions and animation at all, but if you must use them use them sparingly 5) practice your presentation ahead of time to work out the kinks. I have seen my fair share of powerpoint presentations and I think that the common element shared in all of the really bad ones is that the presenter seems nonchalant and disengaged from their information. For me, as long as you are sincerely enthusiastic about your information then I will pay attention.

CLT

Unfortunately I was sick for our visit to the Center for Learning and Technology, and I am bummed that I missed out on Mr. Chapman's lecture because Im sure it was packed with good information. However, I did talk to several classmates and I was able to get the information on CLT through them. I have never been to CLT so I knew nothing about it, but I learned that it is basically the place to be when working on media projects or anything involving technology. Apparently it has a ton of computers, both Macs and PCs, as well as equipment such as digital cameras, microphones, etc. A place like this would be great for our Computer Skills class because it could be used to integrate a home-video into a powerpoint project and much more. This would also be great for my Environmental Geology class when studying plate tetonics and making a visual aid to demonstrate the plates movement. This would even be the place to work with some friends on makeing our own funny video of the dumb things we do. All in all it sounds like the CLT is a cool place and I am sorry that I missed the visit.

Excel

I had no previous experience with excel, so I learned a ton about it and all of its intricacies. Some of the biggest things that stood out to me were things like how to make graphs based off of data, how to use formulas to help you calculate values, and how Excel can be linked to Word and Powerpoint. I was really impressed with the fact that you can simply highlight a set of values and make a really detailed graph or chart based on that information. In my future in baseball I can easily use Excel to make spreadsheets about my pitching stats. It would be very helpful in sorting my data from each outing and then calculating things like my ERA. This is also very useful in schools for projects on just about anything involving numbers. My calculus teacher uses it all the time to show things like exponential growth and standard deviation. Also, in the business world from any kind of accounting standpoint Excel must be an invaluable resource, because it does so many functions with relative ease that would have to be done by hand otherwise. Overall Excel is simply a great invention.

Websites

Chris Nolan's presentation opened my eyes to the possibilities of google. I had no idea that Google had so many different applications. For example, Google Scholar, Google Maps, and Google News are just a few of Google's multitude of applications. I have been a Yahoo guy since thats what my first email account was through, and the search engines are pretty similar. However, Google does appear to have a vastly superior algarithm for finding results and I think I am going to switch over and start using it more often. The presentation taught me that minor reasearch on our part can not only tell us how credible a source is but it can also save us from potentially biased material. I had no idea that .com was signifigantly different than .org or .gov. Now I can use these endings to guide my searches depending on what I am looking for. Also, I was quite suprised to learn that different search engines give you drastically different results.Yahoo and Google were compared on a search dimenstration in class, and the vast majority of their results did not match up at all, and when the results did match up they were in much different orders. I always knew that websites were hit or miss and that often times they were not credible sources, but I never knew how to weed out these faulty websites when doing online reasearch. Now, with the information I learned from Chris Nolan's presentation, I know how to use Advanced Search, Google Scholar, and different combinations of key words to refine my searches and to eleminate the bad results.