PowerPoint Presentations

The articles all bring up very good tips to making a powerpoint presentation. Consistent color schemes, word limitation, and simpleness are key points to making a good presentation. I think the most important tips we learned in class are to:

• Limit text
• Keep bullet points down to a minimum
• Keep color schemes simple and consistent(no bright colors on top of bright colors)
• Use appropriate charts and/or pictures
• Limit animation

If you follow these tips you are well on your way to a successful presentation. Just make sure to deliver your presentation well too!

Searching the Internet

Chris Nolan's presentation taught me a lot about effective ways of searching the internet. I learned how to limit the domain of a search just by adding a few extra words and characters into the search bar. For example, if I wanted to search for only sites with .gov at the end of the url i could just by adding site: .gov in the search bar after the subject. The highlighted tool, cached, surprised me. I never knew about this and I think that if I did know about this tool then I could have followed through some of my researching for papers much more efficiently. Evaluating some of the sites in class was fun. I thought the MLK site was a very good example of a false internet site. The evaluation points that were given to us is a very useful piece of information that I plan on looking at in future researching.

Copyright

I learned many things about copyright from the notes in class. I thought it was very interesting that copyright is older than the Bill of Rights. I also learned about people getting caught for illegally downloading music and how big of a deal it really is. I found it amazing that one person got sued for $250,000! What this person did is extremely unfair. They stole hundreds of songs which is cheating the artists of these songs out of a lot of money. I think that downloading one song is not bad, but then again one song can lead to many songs and soon you could end up like that person who was sued for 2.5 thousand dollars. The RIAA really needs totake their attention away from these people who have only downloaded one or two songs and focus on the peple who illegally distribute music for a profit. I think that the artists will be fine with all the money they already have if someone just downloads one song of theirs.

Excel with Excel!

When coming into this class I did not know how to use Excel. I learned a lot in this portion of the class because I now know a useful way to balance a checkbook and keep track of my grades easily. My favorite thing about Excel was making the charts, I thought it was fun playing with the color schemes. Also, it was interesting using the formulas in the cells and being able to drag down the corners so that you didn't have to retype the formulas in. I think that so far this is the most interesting and useful information we have learned this semester.