Power Points

If I hear that there will be a PowerPoint presentation in one of my classes i rarely look forward to it. This is because many people go about making a PowerPoint in several wrong ways. The Top Ten Slide Tips on Garrreynolds.com are very helpful in showing exactly what not to do when creating a presentation. I enjoyed reading through this site because it was very easy to see what the author was talking about because it showed actual pictures of correct and incorrect slides.
The Recommendations for Faculty on PowerPoint page was a little less interesting. The page included great information like, not including bullet points and putting that information in the notes to be read orally, but it was less enjoyable to read about. The funny thing about the page is that it does many things that it says should not be done in a PowerPoint. I realize that it was probably all presented orally, but if it wasn't it is a great example of how not to organize a PowerPoint.
The digital booklet Really Bad PowerPoint was also very helpful and included some good information. One of my favorite points that Seth Godin makes about the things people do wrong when making a PowerPoint is that people forget that the presentation is meant to be a way to communicate with the audience. He says that slides are often used a teleprompters and I can't agree more. There is nothing worse than sitting through a PowerPoint being read to you.
After reading all of these helpful pages there are at least five things that I hope everyone remembers in preparing his or her PowerPoint:

1. Do NOT read straight from the slides
2. Limit what you put onto one slide, don't over crowd the slide with information
3. Choose color of background and letters and font well
4. Use professional looking images rather than low-grade clip art
5. If including a chart, keep it simple and don't include too many words

Chris Nolan's Presentation

I learned a great deal more about searching the Internet than I already knew when Chris Nolan came to class. I was already relatively familiar with the resources that the library's website offered, but I was not aware of the entire extent of it. I particularly enjoyed choosing the difference between a legitimate education website and a fake one. I thought that was very interesting. The one that caught my eye the most was the Martin Luther King Jr. website. It seemed like a relatively informative website at first glance, but as I read into it I realized that, that was not the case. It was strange to think I was looking at a website devoted to Martin Luther King Jr. when it was really a white supremacy website.

Copyright Laws

The issue of using copyrighted material for educational purposes poses has many loose ends and unresolved problems. Many people think that since most of the material that professors use was written for educational purposes in the first place, the material should be free of charge for any school or university. The other side is simple and thinks that everyone should pay for copyrighted material just the same, given the exception of time. I believe that any material meant to be used constructively toward education, copyrighted or not, should be made available to any teacher or professor at not cost. While there is the exception of time and whether a teacher has time to pay for the material, time should not be an issue. In most cases, the desired material was written with the intention of teaching so I believe that there should be no cost to fulfilling the author's original goal.

Excel

There were many things that I learned about Ecell in class that I did not know before. I knew that there was a way to make equations, but I wasn't sure how to do it. After learning how, I am so glad that I have that skill because it seems very useful. I am also glad that I know how to use Excel to the extent that I do because my mother actually uses it quite often and now I will be able to help her if need be. She owns a grocery store in Alaska and Excel helps her keep track of the employees schedules, shipping dates, and basically everything to do with her income. I am so glad I learned how to use it!