Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Powerful Points

I have never been a fan of PowerPoint presentations as I had awful experiences with them in seventh grade biology when our teacher created a PowerPoint for every class and all we did was copy exactly what it said until our hands hurt and the bell finally rang. Since I have been in college, however, I have discovered that PowerPoints can be helpful in classes such as my Intro to Psych class because unfortunately I went through a phase of poor studentry in regards to the class and our professor posted his PowerPoints on Tlearn so I was able to view the PowerPoints in conjunction with reading the book and get all of the information that I missed in class. Additionally, when I did go to class, it was always very full and since I had a class directly before it on another part of campus, it was difficult to find a seat other than in the back where I couldn't always necessarily hear and therefore having a PowerPoint projected at the front of the room was very helpful, especially when videos or pictures or graphs were involved. Five things I dislike about PowerPoints however are: 1) When the person presenting them simply reads what is on the PowerPoint which they could have either done without the PowerPoint or gone without presenting.2) When the Poweroint is overly artistic and distracts from the information being presented. 3)When there are unnecessary sounds that accompany the heading spinning each individual letter from the background so that it takes 30 seconds just to see what the slide is about. 4) When the slides do not go in a natural order or are difficult to follow. 5) When the appropriate amount of time is not spent on a slide.

Monday, October 18, 2010

CLT VISIT

Although I had been to CLT before, I knew very little about it. I was very surprised to discover that here are rooms available for students that I think would be incredibly useful if working on a large group project that requires different medias. CLT provides a friendly and helpful environment for students to learn how to do anything from uploading a video to editing sound clips and checking out digital cameras. Since the computers are the newest on campus and can handle the largest files, I can see how they would be very helpful to anyone working on a computer science project or otherwise creating a portfolio of some kind. I thought it was interesting to discover that if a teacher needs a certain program for a class or a certain kind of computer, scanner, or anything else is needed, CLT is the place to go. Overall, I think CLT provides a unique and interactive experience as there are both PC And Mac computers and anything you would need to be successful on a task as well as friendly and nowledgeable people to help you.