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Thursday, September 20, 2007

PowerPoint Project

I am really enjoying this project. I like the freedom that we have on choosing our own topic and how we want to present it. So far I am happy with my project and I hope that it is something that can actually be used in a classroom to help students with percentages. PowerPoint is a fun software in which I really like playing around. There are so many tools and features to work with, I always feel like I am coming across new ones. I love fact that you can add motion and sound to make presentations more interesting and keep the students attention. I can definitely see myself using PowerPoint in my future classroom.

Powerpoint Project

I really like this project because it is a fun, interactive, assignment that can be used later in our teaching. It will be a lot of work and sometimes I feel that an overuse of PowerPoint is common and should be avoided. But in this case, we are making PowerPoint the product of our knowledge and using them as a way to relay our knowledge to the students. This helps students because it is a break from the monotonous, mundane, scheduled lives that they live throughout their years in elementary and high school. Power points help, also, because they allow students to interact with the lesson on various levels. For example, access to the Internet is only a click away if a person hyperlinks Internet resources. Also, music, pictures, and other elements are available to be incorporated more efficiently into the lesson.

The Big Project

First of all...I like PowerPoint much better than Excel. I have more fun with composing a project that has to do with my content area. However, I feel that this is a HUGE project without that many guidelines and barely anytime. I just feel that the concept of doing an entire 50 minute presentation in such a short time is a hard task to complete. I also don't know if it is because every project I wish to do I have to research a lot of material so as dates are right, publications are correct, information about the books/plays/literary works are exact, etcetera. I just feel a little overwhelmed because it is such a big project and we are required to make it better than our best presentation. Which I do not know about anyone else, but my best project took me about two weeks to complete.

However, I do enjoy the online tutorials offered to give and refresh new ideas when it comes to PowerPoint, I just wish that we had more time in class to go over newer ways to enhance our projects. I have a difficult time straying away from linear/symmetric projects because I am kinda OCD about that. However, I am enjoying the concept of preparing a unique presentation.

Multimedia project

I am excited about our multimedia project because I think that I will definately be able to reuse it in my future classroom. I have never had to incorporate videos or animation in my presentations before so I am excited to learn and master a new skill. I am also excited to see what everyone else has been working on and to learn from everyone's ideas.

POWER POINT!

After being incredibly frustrated last week with Excel, I finally feel releaved to be working with powerpoint. I have made several detailed powerpoints in the past, and can honestly say that I feel more comfortable with PP than Excel. I love messing around with different features and discovering new tools. Powerpoint is more easy to navigate and more fun to use! This is a program that ANY teacher can use in the classroom. As an English teacher, I feel that I can make interesting and interactive presentations to my class instead of just a lecture. The use of audio and video will especially grab the attention and interest of students. I am excited to play around with this presentation and learn more about Powerpoint.

PowerPoint

I'm having a little bit of trouble gettting PowerPoint to do what I want it to do. I want my pictures and objects to be in very specific places, and the cursor only allows them to go in a very limited amount of places. In order for my visual effects to work correctly, I need my pictures and objects to be in the specific places. For now, I am just putting them as close as I can get them, but I feel like it is making my project less effective. Also, I feel like I am wasting a lot of time trying to get the pictures and objects in their correct positions rather than actually adding content to my slideshow.

My thoughts on the week

Last week I felt very overwhelemed. I felt like I was doing a project that didn't seem to have purpose for me and that was confusing for me. However, after completing the Excel project I did find that it could be very useful. I like the fact that there is a timeline template and I feel that it can be very useful in organizing a nice timeline. I feel like people voicing thier concerns about the work load helped a lot. I like that this project has a rubric for the grade so I can better organize my thoughts and I know what I need to include in my project. The projects seem very openended and I think that's what I find very overwhelming. I'm a person who likes direction and having all the expectations laid out on the table for me. However, I think that having an open ended project will make me think a little bit harder about what is appropriate and what works for a class. I do realize though that in a classroom setting I will have a more defined goal of the semester so I will have a purpose in making a document or project or assingment. As I continue in this class I think that I will learn useful skills that can one day be translated to the classroom, and I hope that I benefit from this experience, even if it is frustrating for me at times.

Powerpoint...

I feel that there is a lot about powerpoint that I have already learned, and at the same time I feel there are still things that I havent learned but could be helpful if I knew about. I feel as though the only things we have gone over so far are tools and things that I have done in the past and feel good about me doing on my own. When I was told that this project was supposed to be better than any other one I have put together, I was thinking that meant we were going to be shown some new ideas and tools that would help to make our projects really stand out and improved from other things in the past. I feel that watching the teacher tube videos have helped me to a point, but I think there is more that I could learn about that I would be able to use in my projects as well as in presentations I may be giving in the years to come. I would be interested in going deeper into the program of powerpoint and learning more about it, but I feel as though I cant do it on my own and need some more instruction to learn what others may know and I do not. I am hoping that through this project and other work for the class I will be able to find things that I can use to make my presentations better and more creative than just the regular slides with words and once in a while a clip art picture here and there.

Wanting more instruction

When I thought about this class I thought that we would be learning and practicing lots of new tools and software during class time. I looked forward to practicing with the guidance of the professor. While we talk about some new tools, I do not really feel like I am learning a lot of new things. For example, the professor wants our PowerPoint presentation to be better than anything we have ever done. However, we have not practiced anything new to be able to enhance our presentation. I could probably figure out some things by myself, but I want to learn the intricacies of the programs and be efficient as possible. I think this class is extremely applicable to our future careers and I hope that we will take the time in class to practice more and to learn new tools. We write about tools we do not know, but we do not actually practice using them in class. For me, it is important to actually practice the steps it takes to get to a certain result. If I need to use a certain tool in the future, but I have not used it in a while, I would hope that I have enough background to remember the steps to get there.