Task 05 gradesheets have been posted

... and I am now moving on to the presentations. As soon as I'm done with the presentations, I'll make one more swing by your websites to see if any identified deficiencies have been corrected. I will then add in the Value Added component of your grades and re-post your final gradesheets. I plan to turn in your grades to the registrar on Wednesday morning (believe it or not, I have to fill out a carbon manifold paper form to do that).

A Nonstarter

Never made it to the front of the classroom for a starter, but I had two cued up that I was ready to deploy. Both are videos that delve a little deeper into some subjects we touched on in class: web design and Linux. I feel these short videos will leave you with a more complete understanding of each:

Web Design tips

The Dangers of Linux

have a good summer,
Mike

Treadmill Desks

Last week in class I talked about the concept of a "treadmill desk." If you're interested in building (and using) one yourself, you can find plenty of info and links with a Google search or by starting at this blog.

June 12 Starter

EDIT: Be warned that when you come close to running out of minutes it automatically charges you for another 10 dollars worth unless you change the preferences. Found this out the hard way

In class on Friday I briefly discussed the application Skype which can be used for multiple means of communication.

Skype

Skype is a great and affordable way to communicate with people oversees. If both parties have a solid internet connection then it is a free service with voice/video chatting and messaging. If only one party has a good connection, however, it also has relatively affordable services for calling international phones from a computer.
http://www.skype.com

A bunch of my friends have used this when studying abroad and I heard really great things about the video chatting. My girflriend recently left for spain for a couple of months and we planned on using this as our main source of communication. Unfortunately it was not as easy as we hoped. The internet in Spain, and I assume in many other European nations, is not nearly as well emplemented as it is here in the States. Apparently a company called Telefonica has a monopoly on the market in Spain and has no financial impetus to better their services. Basically our computer to computer voice conversations were no more effective than typed conversations because of the terrible delay.

After many failed attempts we found out you can prepay to use their service to call phones (that way she does not need an internet connection) for 25 cents a minute which is the same as if you went through the hassel of changing your plan to include international calls, or at least in AT&T's case. The times I have used it, it has worked great and saved me the trouble of dealing with cell phone representatives over the phone.

Date field in database

I think Dr. Bergquist talked about this in class, but I forgot what he said. Should we keep the date field as a text field or convert it to a date or number field somehow?

Starter for June 9th (I think)

I think it was June 9th..haha, pretty late, but check out the link when you're updating your website and finishing up your presentations. It's a pretty nifty tool that, when used properly, can deliver a different experience.

Picasion

Comments & Responses

Comment

I had trouble paying attention during the Powerpoint class today. You doubled back and second guessed yourself so many times that I basically stopped following. I think you need to structure your teaching for that particular class better (especially by letting us know where you are in your overall presentation, so we can see what we've learned and what's important - follow your own rule!)

Response

All too true. I need to restructure that set of slides. Normally I spread it out over three 75 minute sessions, but all at once is a bit much.

Comment

The group work isn't really doing it for me. I feel like doing the projects as a group actually offers me less room to learn that by doing the projects individually. Because here's how group work works: everybody does about 2/3 of their project before the lab class, and then during the lab class the entire group sits together and finishes one of the projects, huddled around a single computer. I would learn more just doing sweating through the entire thing on my own.

Response

There is nothing at all stopping one from doing the project individually. In fact, I expect that each of you will do this. Even when working in a group, one can sweat through the entire project individually and then offer the results of the sweating to the others.
The ability to work effectively in groups is a critical professional skill and one that you can enhance by effective use of the tools we have looked at in the class.

KeynotePro Themes

Since we're covering presentation software - how about some downloadable themes for Mac's Keynote program. KeynotePro, great, great themes: and out of Asheville!

June 8th Starter

Sorry this came a bit late. For my starter yesterday, I introduced a website called The Hunger Site. All you have to do is select the type of donation you would like to make (ie. hunger, breast cancer, rain forest, etc.), then click on the "Click Here to Give" button and it will show you how much you just donated. Each time you click on that button, ads are displayed, and 100% of the money they earn from their sponsors are donated to a cause.

A few clicks a day could help save lives!

Just visit: www.thehungersite.com

Word to PDF Converter

When I was trying to upload my doc file resume on my webpage, I remember that Dr. Bergquist told us to upload it as a pdf.file via converter. So I downloaded this word to pdf converter online at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en. And I converted my resume doc file into pdf file but I couldn't find or enable to download my file from the website. I was wondering which action I should take next.

What's the best search engine?

Most prefer Google. Some think Yahoo!'s not bad. Microsoft's latest entry, Bing, has made a splash in the past week or so. Here's the question: does branding make a difference? Try this blind taste test of search engines to find out.