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.

Photoshop

I chose this picture that was used in a campus brochure in 2000. Wisconsin wanted to show their diversity so they edited a picture from a 1993 football game by putting a picture of a African American student that was taken in 1994. I chose this particular picture because it shows how even academic institutions can utilize photo shop to produce media that has their desired effect. In this case they obviously could not find a picture representing the diversity on campus so they had to go to the lengths of forging a unique photo to impress prospective college students. This is harmful in multiple ways, because on one account the universities reputation is in jeopardy when they use forgery to try and entice students to go there. But more importantly this photo is harmful to the potential student that is swayed to go to Wisconsin based on the diversity that it is shown to have. It is a lose, lose situation and it is completely disrespectful to anyone who has to look at this photograph and realize how Wisconsin is insulting their intelligence with such trickery.