Advice for next semster

Just do not procrastinate, the best thing to do is work on the homework the same night that you had class so that you will not forget anything you learned. Another plus to doing this is that if you do have trouble Mrs. Belisle is always willing to help you out, and lastly make sure to come to class!!

Picture That LIES!!

I had no idea what to do when I first started this project. I just began looking up multiple things and some how I came up with this crazy idea of having a bear parachute. Of course this has never happened so I first took a regular guy parachuting and took him out of it and placed the bear in his spot. To take the man out I used the cloning tool to just put the sky over him. Then I used the magic wand tool to take out the bear from its existing picture and placed him on a new layer connected to the parachute with some painted in straps. Once I had all this finished it look like it still needed something more. So as bad as it is I made the parachute on fire with some holes in it too. Of course this would just be a terrible thing to happen to any skydiver but it definitely to a grizzly bear skydiving! The flames were a little tough to figure out but then when I made them somewhat transparent it looked more realistic I think. Some could consider the manipulation harmful considering the danger the bear is in. However as long as no animal activist take it serious since I would hope nothing like this would ever actually happen, the manipulation is not harmful.

PowerPoint Presentaions

My two favorite presentations were Garrett's and Vanessa's. I liked Garrett's because it made me laugh and was actually very interesting to me because i knew nothing about Southwest Airlines seeing as how my family always flies Delta. His use of animations was great throughout. I never knew that such a big company like Southwest Airlines would ever give their employees such freedoms and increase the money they get because the company is doing so well. I also never knew what hot pants were so i found that interesting. Vanessa's presentation on Enron interested me because i never really knew what happened except for the fact that the company tanked. Now I know that the reason it did was because they were altering their books to make it look like they were doing great when they were really overstating their worth. I liked that she gave information on her slides, but it was not a lot because she elaborated very well which kept my attention.

PowerPoint

The articles on PowerPoint were very helpful, even if you think you know what makes a good presentation. It is said that a good PowerPoint is useless without the presenter. This is true because your PowerPoint should supplement your information not give it. If you want to give handouts with the information covered in the presentation, do it afterwords otherwise people will be distracted by it during and not pay attention to you. Try to stay away from the built-in templates, create your own but keep it consistent and professional.
THINGS TO REMEMBER:
1. Do not read off your slides, have note cards to help yourself.
2. Keep the front big enough so everyone can read it, no smaller then 28.
3. Use real pictures not boring cheesy clip-art.
4. Throw in a video, sound clip, or a question to keep the audience engaged.
5. STAY AWAY FROM SLIDES FULL OF TEXT!!!

CLT

The CLT located in the bottom of the library, really the first floor, is a great place to do work on all kinds of projects with the help of almost every single computer program at your disposal on both a Mac and a PC! If you needed to create a project for class and wanted to use video clips, pictures, and music this would be the ideal place to do such work. Not only do they have top of the line up to date software, the people who work there are more then happy to assist you with using it all too! One of the newest thing that the CLT does is records video of lecturing professors and puts it onto TLEARN, but so far I believe they have only done it in Chapman to a few classes. Another things that I thought was awesome was room 101V which is a professional audio recording room. Although I would have no idea how to use any of the things in this room, I know that if I did, all I would have to do is ask the very knowledgeable staff. One other thing that the CLT does is they check out electronic equipment such as cameras, mp3 players, and many other things that a student could need for a class. In order to do this the teacher just has to fill out a form which allows you to do so. I know that in my computer class I will soon be needing a digital camera so thank goodness I have this at my disposal otherwise I think it would be quite difficult to find one that I could use.
It was with the generous donations made by AT&T that we have these resources. I never knew that the CLT even existed, and now that I do, I see myself taking full advantage of it and you should too!

Excel

Excel is a great application that can be used to do many things. There is a lot of options that can make it a useful tool whether you need to compare data, help organize data, and even make calculations from the data provided! It can be very helpful in almost any business setting and academic field. For example at my job this summer as a lifeguard, I helped my boss use excel to make weekly schedules then calculate the hours accordingly. As far as academic fields go, excel can be great for creating charts and graphs to help display data or even show the bell curve on a midterm.

I learned a lot of useful things in excel that i never knew before class. I never knew so many functions even existed, even though we only learned a few. My favorite function that we did learn was the IF function that allows you to check to see whether a function is true or false. The way you are able to freeze columns and/or rows was also very neat I thought because it makes it so much easier to find a particular set of data with out having to get mixed up in the surrounding data. I also never knew you could insert a table into a word document and change the table still using excel.

All together the things I learned will be very useful for the next time I ever have to do a statistical analysis of a large set of data. It will also help keep things organized and even help me keep track of my money in the future thanks to the many templates that deal with financial computation.

Mr. Nolan's Lecture

I learned many things from Mr. Nolan's lecture that i never knew about using search engines. I found it interesting when he told us that people search more in Microsoft then at Ask.com. I never even knew that Microsoft had a search engine! What was also cool was when he showed us that you are able to compare search results between Google and Yahoo. This could be very useful especially if you do not find exactly what you are looking immediately, the other might be able to provide it for you since they use different algorithms in getting their search results.
I also learned about what the endings to websites mean. For example ".org" means that it is a nonprofit organization and their are many different agendas these organizations can have, so before relying on such sites it is important to check their purpose, which can usually be found on the site. Even though I already knew that ".gov" meant that it was a government website, Mr. Allen pointed out that these are not always reliable too because they can have biased or censured information, which surprised me. The best way to get viable information from a search engine is to look for scholarly articles, which Google makes particularly easy since you can limit your search for only these things.
The most interesting thing I learned from Mr. Nolan was that you can search in Google in different languages such as pig latin, or even Pirate talk! This is not necessarily helpful but it is really cool and could be fun if you are bored. Here is one that is for Elmer Fudd, http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/.