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/.

Pictures That Lie

I chose the picture of The University of Wisconsin football game because I find it funny that in order to show their diversity they must paste the photo of the black student, Diallo Shabazz, into it. The picture originally did not have Diallo in it, resulting in no diversity in the picture at all. I do not believe the manipulation was harmful since Diallo was indeed a student there I believe, he was just not originally in the picture. I do not understand though why they were not able to find a new photo of new students that actually depicted their diversity.