Advice to New Students

If I could give new students one piece of advice for this class it would be to pay attention because you will use this in the real world. The reason I took this class is because I learned in my internship that my computer skills needed some polishing and now I will be much better off for taking this class.

Websites

I thought everyone did a great job on their websites. I was able to learn a lot about the people in the class that I didn't know before. My favorites were Emmalee's website about the dire situations around the world. It was a great idea that really showed what she cared about. Another great website was Shelby's. I thought she had a good layout and was very thorough with her designing. My third favorite was Jon's. I learned a lot about him that I didn't know already. It was great to see what his life is like outside of Trinity. If you want to see my website visit http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jpearce1

HTML

I think it's very important that all people who design or maintain webpages know HTML code. The code is not that difficult to use and with a little practice is easy to manipulate. Although newer software is much more user friendly and creates more aesthetically pleasing pages, you cannot forget the importance of HTML. By knowing HTML you could alter the page without having to open any type of software. If the software is malfunctioning, HTML is an easy way to correct any problems that are on the page. HTML, although much more complicated and labor intensive, is still a necessity.

PowerPoint Presentations

I thought everyone did really well during the presentations but two did stand out to me. First, I thought Emmalee's presentation about Carhutha was very entertaining. She had great pictures and graphics to go along with her presentation and it was a great way to combine the art of storytelling and factual events. It was well prepared and she kept the classes attention.

The second presentation that I thought stood out was Raelle's about the Alamo Drafthouse. It was pretty obvious that she was very interested in her topic and knew a great deal on the topic. She did a great job of finding pictures and knew the history of the owner as well as the business.

Google Search

I had no idea that google had created so many different functions within their searches. I am definitely going to use Google Scholar now that I know about it. It seems so much easier than the schools old system to search articles. I also learned that you can define words through Google. That's so much easier than going to dictionary.com.

Learning all the different ways to define my searches will definitely save me time next time I'm researching a topic. Being able to search on certain domains will greatly improve my productivity. I was really surprised that google rates their searches based on how many times a particular site is linked to. It seems like that would cause there to be a lot of misinformation if a site is popular, but so far it has worked.

What ruins a PowerPoint Presentation

Through my years at Trinity I've seen a lot of presentations. Using these as a guide I've been able to discover what makes a presentation appealing to an audience and what puts them to sleep.

1) Be brief. Adding too much information onto one slide makes it seem as though you are reading aloud what the class could read on their own. Keep you bullets as minimal as possible so you can elaborate on your own and keep you audience engaged.

2) Don't use too many animations. Animations may seem like they would keep your audiences attention but they actually detract from you overall message. The content of you presentation is what's important not how it appears on the screen or how the slides transition.

3) Use a professional quality template. Nothing shows that your a novice as much as a poor template and design. It is worth the extra time to design a high quality template that is appealing and goes with your overall message. Using one of the pre-made templates is acceptable over creating mismatched color schemes that tell the audience you didn't take the time to work it.

4) Not every slide needs a visual. This was the most important thing I learned during my internship. Not every slide needs to have a photograph or design. People learn differently so mixing up the styles from visual to audible will help the group as a whole understand your message.

5) Be consistent. Do not change your formatting for each slide. It will confuse your audience and they will have to adjust to each different slide. Choose a format and stick with it.

Excel

I've had quite a bit of experience with Exel before taking this class. I used it all summer during my internship as an anaylst and created many spreadsheets that the new intern is currently using. But during this section of the class, I have learned a lot of shortcuts that will allow me to create spreadsheets quicker and more efficiently.

I didn't have any hands-on experience with the new version of Excel so now the layout is much easier for me to understand and manipulate. I hadn't used conditional formatting before so this will allow me to format my spreadsheets without slowly chaning each cell. This is going to be useful in the future because as a finance and accounting major I will be looking at spreadsheets. Being able to quickly understand and formulate ways to manipulate the data will be a great advantage I will have over others who may not be as familiar with the program.