PPT 1

Cause and effect 

For this activity we had to create a powerpoint that would hold an audience's attention.  Something different than an old boring, bullet point slide show.  I am pretty familiar with powerpoint so making the slides wasn't a big issue for me.  What took the most time for me was finding images that I wanted to use from the internet.

I decided on a very simple topic of Cause and Effect.  I have taught the topic before to second graders and I thought having a visual representation of the idea would go along way in helping them to understand.  After gathering the images, the slide show assembly went pretty fast.  I didn't use a lot of text so there wasn't too much to format, etc.

I already had a DropBox account so I didn't have to create a new one to save my Cause and Effect PowerPoint.

After I saved the powerpoint the difficulties began.  I was working in PowerPoint 2013 and after saving to drop box I wanted to access the <embed> code so I could paste the slideshow into my blog.  Turns out there was a change from PowerPoint 2010 to 2013 and the Share > Embed menu item is no longer there.  So I started down a long path in trying to figure out how to get this embeded in to my blog.  Finally I used a website called SlideShare which let me upload my PowerPoint and create the necessary HTML code to paste into my blog.

These steps took a few tries.  My slides looked perfect in PowerPoint but after uploading and embedding some of the text had shifted and things were a bit botched.  I repeated the process a few times but there are still one or two slides were words are out of place.  I'm not sure what to do differently to prevent or change that.

NETS 3 applies to this activity because Powerpoint is a great tool for teachers to use to teach digitally to their students.

Paper Revise

This assignment gave us the opportunity to correct any errors in our APA papers and then re-format them in a different way.

I wasn't aware that each submission into a journal might potentially require a different format, so that was an interesting tidbit of information.  I don't know how this activity will help in the classroom, exactly, but it did help improve my comfort level with Word.

APA Format Mini-paper

I must admit I'm not sure if we are supposed to blog about our APA mini-paper formatting or not.  I didn't create a post when I submitted the paper but thought I'd better go back and update my blog just in case.

I have a love/hate relationship with APA formatting.  I understand there should be some standard for the multitude of papers created by people for research or educational purposes.  It is nice that the title pages and references all conform to a specific format.  On the other hand, I think APA is a bit extreme.  For example, centering a table vs. left justifying it.  In my mind, that doesn't need to be a rule. 

Although programs like Word have made writing in APA format easier with pre-formatting and citation building processes, I still dread the thought of writing APA papers.