Thinking About Subject Material

While this class has taught me a lot about each individual program, I think that the ability to truly use them well in a classroom is yet to come. I haven't had a sufficient amount of time to sit and think how I can use the programs creatively in different parts of a physics curriculum. I think that this skill will come more with time, but I am looking forward to gaining the ability to surprise students with the ways I us different media in my classroom

Power Point

Once again I am behind the curve with yet another facet of Microsoft Office 2007. I have not had to use power point for a very long time, so my existing skills were mediocre at best. This new version has taken everything that I am familiar with about power point and thrown it out the window. While things like making the slides interactive or adding multimedia have become very easy, the basic functions aren't located where I would expect them to be and it is making everything slightly difficult.

MOVIE PROJECT

I enjoyed the movie making project a lot. I hope I will be able to use projects similar to this when I become a teacher. I think allow a student to use there creativity in a class where they typically would not expect to is an excellent way to pique their interest and help them learn material better than they normally would with traditional instruction. Physics, i feel, lends itself a little more readily to movie making because of the existence of all the physical principles they will be learning about in a student's everyday life. I only hope that my students/school district will have the technological capabilities to support such a project. Being thatwe will be well into the digital generation, I can only assume they will.

Audacity

I did not like audacity, although for free music editing software it did do the job. I am used to much more advanced and programs like protools, and cooledit which are quite expensive programs that come with a plethora of plug-ins and customizing features. Audacity had very limited editing features and I would have liked the ability to alter the music and sound effects we were using more than I had in the video.

Windows movie maker

Windows Movie maker was a big surprise for me. I am very familiar with imovie and since I liked it so much i wrote off any PC programs for digital media. Windows Movie Maker turned out to be very user friendly and quite handy. It took me a little while to learn the ropes, but once I did i was pleased with the programs abilities. It still doesn't quite compare to imovie, but it is a suitable alternative.

Microsoft Excel 2007

I have noticed i have been discussing the differences between the office programs recently, both on and off of this blog. I think this is mostly because of how fond I am becoming of the updated version, and because of how jealous I am that I don't have it on my PC. Microsoft Excel 2007 has been a hassle for me recently. I have become vary familiar with the shortcuts an locations of most of the functions for the program in the past several years. I have found myself struggling much more with figuring out this program than i have been with Microsoft Word. I will say that I do enjoy some of the new things that I have managed to figure out.

Word 2003 vs. Word 2007

Upon returning back to Albright this past fall I found myself reeling when I went into the computer center to type one of my papers, of course, the night before it was due. The tech department went and replaced the Microsoft 2003 suite, which i have been in a close relationship with for 5 years, with a new and unfamiliar Microsoft 2007 suite. Luckily for me I was only typing a paper that day, which was relatively unaffected by the change. When I was finished, however, I could not even locate the spell checker. I felt abandoned and outdated. Since that day I have spent quite a bit of time fumbling around with the new software and learning how it works and where everything is. After a while i found myself doing most of my work in the computer lab on the new suite, just to avoid any incompatibilities between my much adored Word 2003, and this new Word 2007. Today I hit a crossroad. I took out my laptop to finish the projects I had been working on for class only to find that the new skills I have been honing in class are not applicable to Word 2003. Not only that, but a lot of the features that I needed to use were not part of the software. I was heartbroken. My old love with Word 2003 has faded. I think I actually like Word 2007 better. Sorry Word 2003, but as they say, "out with the old and in with the new."