Website Favorites

The websites were really fun to see because it gave us so much insight into everyone's hobbies and interests. It was a great way to appreciate everyone’s individual creativity and wrap up the semester. I thought Joy Lin had an amazing site. She is extremely talented with Photoshop. I also really liked her page about the festivals from her home; I thought that was very unique. Casey Kay had a really cool website as well. His links were set up in a very organized fashion and he had great designs. I also thought it was great how he will be able to use the information we learned in class to improve his own existing website. I thought Ralph Petang’s site was very aesthetically pleasing. He had some great pictures. It was really neat how he set up a scenario with pictures of what steps he takes to pick a vacation. His links to the cooking website were fabulous as well. The entire class did a great job on this project and it was obvious that a lot of work went into the process, these were just a couple of my favorites.


You can check out my own website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~aedwards

Good Advice for Next Year

Keep in mind all of the ways you will be able to use the tools and skills you learn in this class later in your Trinity career and in the business world!

Expression Web

Expression Web and other web creator software is extremely important to have because it cuts out a lot of time in the web production process. I still think it is important to understand the codes and what they stand for. This way if there is a problem you are able to maually fix it or alter certain portions of the site with coding. It is fascinating to see what can come from a series of letters that compose the code.

Powerpoint Presentations

I really enjoyed seeing all of the different techniques and learning about the variety of topics presented on during the class PowerPoint presentations. Two in particular stuck out to me, Ralph Petang's PowerPoint on soccer and Ben Klimesh's on umpiring baseball. I really enjoy sports so that caught my attention at first, but my enjoyment went much deeper than just the level of topic. I really thought Ralph did a great job keeping the word's to a minimum and letting the slide's do a lot of the talking for him. His photographs were amazing. It almost seemed like it was professionally assembled because of the smoothness of the transitions between photographs or quotes. You could really feel the passion he had for his subject through his presentation and the content of the slides. Ben did a great job keeping his presentation light and made it fun to learn about the fundamentals of umpiring baseball. I really liked the photographs that he chose to illustrate where the umpires stand when they are working a game. I also enjoyed his background on criteria a person needs to have in order to umpire a game, it was very interesting. His slides were ordered in a very organized manner and it seemed to transition between his points well. The design also looked good, I thought he had a simple, yet fun font that he used through out the PowerPoint.

Chris Nolan

I think Chris Nolan had a lot of great information about researching online and through the Coates database. Something new that I found out was how to do an advanced search on Google. I really liked the capability of searching for certain types of documents and also how to search for documents if you don't want a certain word to be included in the results, like Chris' example of searching for Mexico and having many New Mexico sites pop up by default. One thing I found interesting was that most of the academic sites on Google do not show up until many pages into searching unless you do an advanced search. I always thought that Google would list the scholarly and academically credible sites first.

Powerpoint Tricks and Tips

I thought that the three different articles did a really great job both giving some background on the reasoning on why and how we use PowerPoint and I was surprised to learn that they taught me a couple lessons that I will now be able to use on my PowerPoint presentations in the future. I thought it was very interesting to learn that powerpoint was created by a group of engineers so that they could better communicate with their marketing teams. I also was surprised to learn rules such as standard backgrounds and graphics from powerpoint should not be used and bullet points are rarely needed. It just seems that based on other presentations I have seen people use these two techniques a lot. Two of the most important suggestions that I took from the articles were that texts should always be size 28 or above and the B key can be used to make a slide go blank so that the audience focus' on the presenter and iformation.

The Guidelines that I found most important and interesting were:

1. Keeping the PowerPoint simple. A very valid point was made in the "Top Ten Slide Tips" article was that the slides are not supposed to be the star of the show, the presenter and the information presented should be the main focus.

2. Limit transitions and builds. Everyone has sat through a painfully drawn out, over-animated presentation at some point during grade school because one of their peers was overly excited or just thought it would be funny to make a slide with a different transition for every single word on it. It is horrible to sit through and it is nearly impossible for the audience to listen to any sort of message or information presented because they are so distracted.

3. Use high-quality graphics. I thought it was interesting that the point was made to use photographs always, and never clip art. I have seen many of my teachers, professors or professional presenters over the years use clip art in their presentations. I think it is a valid point though, clip art does look a lot less professional than a high-quality photograph.

4. Avoid PowerPoint templates for a visual theme. I would not have thought about this either before reading the article "Top Ten Slide Tips." I always thought it was semi-professional to use a standard template from PowerPoint but using an original background would definitely better captivate the audience and make it easier to remember in the viewers head because of its originality.

5. Use color well. I love that the article spoke about color linking to emotions. I find that to be incredibly true. I have so much appreciation for a slide show that uses a combination of colors wisely. It helps me relate to and appreciate the information and the slide so much more than a standard black and white slide would. I also found the information about cooler colors being better for backgrounds and warmer colors being better for foreground text and objects because it pops out at you very beneficial and interesting.

Experience with Excel

The most important and useful thing I learned in Excel was definitely how to use equations and cell references. I will be able to use that in any career I end up pursuing, but it should be especially useful since right now I am majoring in accounting. Until we get to upper level classes a lot of our work is done on either word or excel. I wish that I would have had the Excel knowledge I do know for my past 2 semesters of accounting, it would have saved me a lot of time. The most interesting part of Excel that I learned how to use though was how to merge cells and how to decorate and format documents to make them more aesthetically pleasing. This is just an anal-retentive issue I have with organization and presentation of projects, they are minor details but I really appreciate how much nicer they make a document look.