Websites

Here are my three favorite websites:

*I liked Zach's website about his life. He showed different pictures to illustrate different aspects in his life. It had a good organization and was consistent with the colors.

*Emmalee's website about different organizations was very interesting. The colors she chose for the website supported the message she wanted to transmit. I liked the organization of the tables, how she combined text and images.

*Drew's website looked really professional. The colors and information were appropiate. It was interesting to see the sports page.


If you want to visit my website, go to http://cs.trinity.edu/~kartolag

For the new students!

The semester is almost over, and looking back I see that we've learned a lot in class. For the new students, here's my advice that hopefully will help you in this class:

*Take this class with a right attitude. That's the only way you'll get something out of this course. Ms. Belisle teaches a lot of useful information, and if you are not with the right attitude, you will not learn anything.

HTML

We have just started a new topic in class, HTML. HTML is the language to create websites. Now there are programs, such as Expression Web and Dreamweaver, where you can design a website without writing the codes because the program does that for you. Even though you don't write the codes with these programs, it is important to know how to do a website "by hand" and without the help of a program in case there is a problem that the program can't fix or if you want to add something else to the website. Also, it's not good to be dependable on a program because you won't be able to do anything in case the program stops working.

PPT Presentations!

From all of the presentations, the two that I liked best were Cristina's and Kat's.
Cristina's presentation about The Lion King musical was well designed. The color scheme and the slides were appropiate, they weren't too crowded. Her presentation was informative, and it made me feel more interested in musicals and theatre. I particularly liked how she explained all of the work that actors have to go through to portray animals on stage.
I also liked Kat's presentation about Annie Leibovitz.The design was nice and it wasn't boring. I like photography, so I enjoyed this presentation because I like to learn about famous photographers and ther work. I think it was really cool how Leibovitz was the last person to photograph John Lennon, and that cover from the Rolling Stone is just amazing. Kat's presentation had enough information about Leibovitz, and her slides complimented what she was explaining.

Chris Nolan

Chris Nolan, the assistant librarian, came to our class to talk about finding high-quality information on the web. Before his presentation, I had no idea that Google Scholar existed, which I think it's pretty helpful and a nice option to have(Thanks Google!).Google Scholar searches info that’s also in the main database, but attempts to prioritize websites that might be scholarly. You can also use the advanced search with Google Scholar. With the advanced search, you can limit the search to look for a specific language, sites or domains, or dates.
Another thing mentioned that caught my attention is the Cached page. A cached website is a copy of a page saved on the google server that can be accessed even if the website crashes. This cached page can be a great solution if too many people are trying to access the same website at the same time, or if the page has technical problems. It also highlights the keywords that you used in your search, making it easy to skim an article to see if it's relevant or not.

I think the information he gave us was very informative because I learned of many options that google has that I wasn't aware of.

PowerPoint Presentations

After reading the articles about what to do and not to do in a PowerPoint presentation, here are my five favorite points:
*Choose your fonts well: I honestly didn't know that there are serif and sans serif fonts, which I thought it was interesting. It's also important to choose the right font or otherwise the font can be distracting or make the presentation dull.
*Spend time in the slide sorter: Definitely something I never do, but now I will! While making the presentation, you can get off topic, repeat yourself or have slides that don't flow. If you take a couple of minutes in the slide sorter, it will make a big difference.
*PowerPoint is not a teleprompter: it's not hard to understand- STOP READING FROM THE PRESENTATION!
*No cheesy images: Thank you Microsoft for providing a clip art gallery, but we don't need it..
*No more than six words on a slide: No need to explain this.

In addition, here's a video that my seminar Professor showed in class because we have to make a PP. presentation next week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cagxPlVqrtM

Good luck with your presentations!

Excel

During this first part of the semester we learned about spreadsheets.Before taking this course, I didn't know how to make a running balance sheet, which I think it's very useful so I can at least try to organize my own budget, and I had no idea that there was such thing as an "IF function". I think it’s going to be helpful to know how to use excel in the future, mainly for my math and maybe science classes. So far, I’ve only used it once for one of my photography assignments, where I had to do a chart and a graph, but it was rewarding to see how easily I could make it while other students where struggling with it. Another thing that I found useful is that I can use my information from excel in my power point presentations to show graphs and charts about data that I might collect for a certain project.
What I liked most from learning how to use excel is that I used to think that it could only be used to create inventories or budgets in companies. I was definitely wrong. I know that I won't use excel for every single class in the next four years, but I can definitely see myself using it and making my life easier.