PowerPoint Pointers

Today we learned how to do different things with Power Point and custom animation. Last week's lesson focused on presenting information. This week we are focusing on reviewing information. Pierce showed us how to use animation to show parts of slide at a time, fade out wrong answers on a quiz, and draw custom animation motion paths.

The next day we learned something very nifty. We learned how to make "buttons" of sorts for our powerpoint. We selected the slide on which we drew arrows to label things and we hit ctrl D, which makes a duplicate of that slide. We clicked on the duplicate slide and removed the animation by clicking on the animation tab and clicking remove.

Our goal was to make the answers come up when we click the button we made (insert shapes, right click edit text) and hide the answers by clicking the other button we made, labeled Hide Answers. To do this, we had to first group the words together so they could share the same animation. To do this, we hit shift & clicked each of the answers. Next, we went to the Home tab, clicked Arange, and selected Group. Next, we clicked custom animation. We picked the effect we wanted for our entrance and then double clicked the name of the effect. From there we selected the tab Timing, and where it says Triggers we selected the name of the button we had made. We repeated this step for the exit of the answers, using the button Hide Answers.

This lesson was super cool. I had no idea you could do this. It would be great for a review game.





This follows the NETS Standards:
2. Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments
a. design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.
PowerPoint is definitely a digital tool and with our knew found knowledge of cool ways to teach with it, we can use it to teach.
d. provide students with multiple and varied formative and summative assessments aligned with content and technology standards and use resulting data to inform learning and teaching.
This assignment fits this standard perfectly, since we have just learned how to use PowerPoint as a means of quizzes students and finding out how much they know.

Presentation

Summaries of the Articles Read: 

Briefings on Afghanistan are mostly done using Power Point. Critics of this say that “the program stifles discussion, critical thinking, and thoughtful decision-making”. Generals in the US military say that most of their time is spent making powerpoints. Others say that sitting through the briefings is almost painful. While the briefings are long, it seems, they do not contain a lot of information and are too vague for specific matters of war time. 

The second article gives tips on making and presenting powerpoints. Some of the most important points: know what you want to say before you make the powerpoint, retain organization, keep your sentences short, don’t put too much on one slide, proof read, keep “like” topics together, use graphics when possible instead of words, size 28 to 34, bold, is a good font size, don’t put too many numbers, use contrasting colors (black on white, white on black), avoid the default white background,  limit animation. For the presentation, look presentable, speak clearly and loudly with enthusiasm, don’t read your slides, and be engaged with your audience. 

With this information in mind, we were to create a Power Point presentation. My presentation is on the parts of a story, which special emphasize as example, the Harry Potter series. (When presented, I would set it to where I had to click to show the pictures and Harry Potter references, so I could ask the students what they thought the answers were.) We uploaded our Power Point using Slide Share.

This fulfills the NETS Standards:

2. Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments

a. design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.
PowerPoint is a digital tool and I would be using it to convey information to the students in a creative way.

3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
c. communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.
I would be using a digital media to convey information to my students.

Parts of a story

View more presentations from Kayla Henson.

Google Map

Using a shared Google Docs spreadsheet, the people in my class entered their addresses. I copied and pasted them into Batchgeo and this is the map it generated:

This follows the following NETS Standards:
2. Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessmentsa.design or adapt relevant learning experiences that incorporate digital tools and resources to promote student learning and creativity.
3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
c. communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.
This could be useful in connecting locations for students and helping them to see where certain historical events have taken place in West Virginia.
If I had had this in my AP English class in high school when we needed to make a map of all the places the writer had been, it would have made my life much easier.

Resume

Today we created online resumes using Google documents. We selected a resume template and filled in our information. Then, we published the document. Mine can be found here.

This applies to the NETS standards:

3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning
a. demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations.
We transferred our old knowledge of how to make a resume into new technologies-Google documents, which allowed us to more easily access and send our resumes. 
c. communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.
We are using Google documents to communicate relevant information about ourselves to prospective bosses. 

Google Calendar

Today we learned how to create a calendar in Google. This is helpful not only for me in my private life but also in my life as a teacher. Since we also learned how to make a google site today, I can place this calendar in my google site and thus share the classroom schedule with parents and students.




This follows the following NETS Standards:
3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning

b.	collaborate with students, peers, parents, and community members using digital tools and resources to support student success and innovation.

c.	communicate relevant information and ideas effectively to students, parents, and peers using a variety of digital-age media and formats.

Both of these standards go hand in hand really. This calendar, published to my website, will show students and their parents what we will be doing in class and when specific assignments will be due.

National Council of Teachers in English

This organization was formed on December 2, 1911 to combat the "overly-specific college entrance requirements and the effects they were having on high school English education".

The 2010 Annual Convention, "Teachers and Students Together: Living Literate Lives" will be held on November 18 through the 21st in Orlando, Florida at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort.

The post convention workshops are held November 22nd and 23rd.

Their goal is "to foster more open and democratic teaching practices". They want intergrated cirricula and they want to address how the things we ask students to do affect the, psychologically.

This fits the NETS Standard:
5. Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership

a.	participate in local and global learning communities to explore creative applications of technology to improve student learning. This convention would be participating in a local learning community.

d.	contribute to the effectiveness, vitality, and self-renewal of the teaching profession and of their school and community.

One of there goals is self-renewal and they are addressing the effectiveness of practices already in place.

Excel 2

Given a spreadsheet, we were to find the average, max, min, and range of the grades, as well as determine each student's indiviual grade.

First, we found the average of the grades. By finding the average grade of the first assignment using the  average function, we could determine the averages for the rest by clicking on the handle and dragging across. This is helpful because you do not have to type or click the same function repeatively.

There is no function for range, so we made one. We typed = and then clicked on the max value, typed a minus, and clicked on the min value.

Get the average of the grades, weigh them by a quarter. Get the average of the tests and weigh them by a half. The project also gets a quarter.
To do this, we had to make a formula.

(G1+G2)/2) * .25 The first half is the average of the two. .25 to get the weighted average.
G1 & G2 will be your cell ranges.

(G1+G2)/2 * .25 + (t1+t2/2) * .5 = (P * .25) This is what we had on the board for the formula but it is not correct. The parentheses have to match up and you must change "G1",etc to cell ranges.

Next, we used the help menu to find the IF function, and we used it to determine the letter grades.

When we were finished with all this, I made the background of my table purple by highlighting everything and selecting a filler color. I made borders around every cell by highlighting them all and right clicking format cells.

This exercise is going to be extremely helpful in my future, as this will be how I will complete my gradebook.
It follows the following NETS Standards:
1. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity

b.	engage students in exploring real-world issues and solving authentic problems using digital tools and resources.

Using the program Excel will prove useful not only to me as a teacher but also to my students as well. For a science project, they might collect data and determine things about said data using excel.

3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning

a.	demonstrate fluency in technology systems and the transfer of current knowledge to new technologies and situations.

Using Excel as a gradebook demonstrates fluency in technology.