Before this class began, I found myself dreading it just a bit because the title for the class didn’t seem too exciting. I had had so much fun the previous term in the digital imaging class, and this class sounded too much like a lot of work and not a whole lot of fun. To my surprise, there were some fun assignments, and the class was interesting afterall.
In this class, I learned a lot about spreadsheets and mail merge using Microsoft Excel and Word. I had taken the class with a friend, and she was able to see how she would be able to use it in her classroom right away. I had a little more difficulty finding ways to use Excel in the classroom. It wasn’t until after the class had ended that I found out that our school had received some grant money and that we would be able to buy some well-needed PE equipment for our kindergarten through third grade classes to share. I sat down with the teachers who had attended the meeting and wrote down a list of wants/needs. After I got home, I was able to use Excel to make a chart of what items we wanted to order, the catalogs that carried the items, the item numbers, and the costs for the items in each catalog. Later, once it had been approved by the principal, I created another Excel document to give to the school secretary that had all the items with photos (in case she wanted to look them up in the catalogs before ordering) the prices, and the grand total. Using what I had learned in EDU 512 made this an easy project, and people at my school were impressed with what I had learned.
Another thing I learned in this class and found useful was how to set tabs and insert page and section breaks into a document. I send home a weekly newsletter, and since I teach kindergarten, I want those newsletters to be cute. I have in the past spent some time looking for newsletter templates online, but there haven’t been any that I really have like. Now that I know how to insert breaks, I can make newsletters that have different sections with columns in the middle to bottom of the page but not at the top. Learning to set tabs was useful as well. I remember having that “Aha moment” in class when the professor showed us how to do it. Now when I make documents with lines for the children’s answers, the lines will all be the same length!
In this class, I had to compare two applications that had similar purpose. I chose to compare Microsoft PowerPoint to Apple Keynote. There were many ways in which the applications were the same. They are both good presentation software, but in the end, I found just one more reason why I like Apple Computers.
