Advice for future classes...

This is a very fun class, but if you want to do well, you MUST keep up with the homework every night. Try not to get behind, because each class builds on the previous one. Have fun and be creative with it!

Our First Websites

For our first shot at making a web page, I'd say the whole class did a great job! Once I got past the nit-picky details, I actually had a lot of fun making my website. There were a couple sites from our class that I particularly liked. Ashley's was very well designed, and I really liked her collage on the homepage. I also liked her page with all of her photography work; it looked very nice on the black background. Danika's website was also very good. She has a great design, and I really liked her hometown collage. Her gallery was really good as well. And, I really liked Jeanna's website. She obviously has an amazing talent with digital graphics. I really liked how unique her design was and how fun her click-ons were.

Everyone did an excellent job in designing their websites! I thoroughly enjoyed making my own. You can visit it at www.cs.trinity.edu/~mappelba

The Joys of Creating a Webpage

I always thought that creating a web page would be very difficult. Now that I know how to do it, I still think so! It is a very meticulous process if you do it by hand, but it is a lot more fun than I expected. I'm sure most professional page-makers use cool programs like Microsoft Expression Web to make the process easier and quicker, but they do need to know how to hand code a web page. Nifty programs are not always perfect, and if something were to go wrong or breakdown, the designer would need to be able to fix the web page by hand. Also, they would be able to read the html of other pages and either learn new techniques or point out errors for that page. It is always good to know the basics before you learn the high tech advancements.

PowerPoint Presentations

Our class is rather skilled in PowerPoint I believe. All of the presentations were well constructed and demonstrated a certain level of skill. The presentations themselves were good too; no one simply read off of their slides. There were a couple that stood out to me as excellent though.

I really enjoyed Jose's PPT for a number of reasons. He had a unique topic and obviously enjoyed talking and learning about it. His PPT was put together well; I really liked his background because it was simple and yet very effective. He also had a good use of pictures and animation. I enjoyed listening to his presentation.

Ashley's PPT was also very nice. It was professional but not boring! She utilized her background, fonts, and pictures very well, and made them all fit an overall theme of business and communication. Her gif was also very creative. Ashley made a very convincing point with her PPT presentation.

Like I said though, our entire class did a marvelous job with this assignment.

PowerPoint 101

These articles have some great advice for making a PowerPoint presentation, although I have heard most of these tips. The article "Really Bad Power Point - and How to Avoid It" was enjoyable and I liked how it made fun of the bad issues of PPT but then corrected the problems and stated what should be done. I also liked the faculty advice article because I have had professors do some of the things the article advises against.

To me, some of the most important tips for making a PPT include: having legible fonts, having appropriate colors (nothing too flashy), limiting slide and word transitions, using enough pictures to make it interesting but not inundated, and most importantly limiting the amount of words on a slide. The most annoying thing in a PPT presentation is having all of the words on the slide so that the presenter ends up reading the PPT. Using crazy fonts, colors, and transitions is forgivable, but reading the slides like a book is not!

Searching on the Internet

Chris Nolan gave some very helpful advice in his presentation today. I for one did not know Google could get any better! But with the advance search and Google Scholar options, Google can help a lot more with school related searches. I was a little surprised when he said that not all .gov sites were reliable. I had always believed they were the best sources of information. Then when he said that .org and .edu were not always reliable either, I began to wonder if anything was. But there are good website sources out there; you just have to be careful and read the all of the details when trying to find a reliable source.

Copyright Craziness

The most important thing I learned in the presentation is the distinction between copyright and plagiarism. I knew about each , but didn't actually understand the details involved and the difference between the two. It is rather simple though; plagiarism is ethical and involves citation, while copyright is legal and involves permission.

One of the big issues today with copyright is the mindset that if something is on the Internet, it is up for grabs. I can see how people would think this, since everyone can access things for free online, but, anything written after April of 1989 is legally protected no matter where it is published, even if it does not outright say "copyrighted." I certainly have thought this before and have wanted to use some material from the Internet. I understand the idea that it is on the Internet and should be expected to be used. But I see that it is wrong to just take it. I would not want people to take my work or even my ideas without my permission, even if it was within easy access on the Internet.