Webquest

The webquest may have been one of my most challenging, yet most rewarding assignment this semester. This is the one assignment that I feel really challenged me. The challenge of creating the assignment in full was probably the most work for me, but the programs were also somewhat of a struggle. I had gone through three programs before I was able to get one to work for me. I ended up using questgarden.com which both made the assignment go smoothly and quite difficult due to the lack of personalization.

Creating a research type assignment for business classes was quite difficult for me. I do not feel that a lot of research is done as it may be for history or similar subject. For this reason I decided to create an assignment were the students would research something and create a business document from the information they gathered. The challenge for the students is to research their hometown (in this case Morgantown) and create a marketing/tourism brochure, booklet, or webpage that promotes this town. Through this assignment the students would not only be doing research to figure out what aspects of the location would be useful for promotion purposes, but would also be utilizing their computer skills in creating the final document. This webquest could be altered in numberous ways to creat different experiences or outcomes. Each group could be assigned a different city or state, additional elements could be added or changed, and the final outcome could be changed to a poster or oral presentation rather than a brochure or webpage.

WEB QUEST

Fun with data

I guess I didn't completely understand the directions for this assignment. From what I was reading, I was under the impression that we did not need to submit the assignment until all the components were complete. The smart thing to do would have been to submit my work as soon as I had finished it early last week, but I've been a little scatter brained since my husband returned from Iraq on Friday. I'm just now starting to get back into real life after being so off for a few days.

This assignment was quite easy once I got a grasp on what was required of me. I love using Excel and enjoy formatting the equations and the document. The formatting assignment was simple; just make the second and third worksheets look like the first worksheet. The manipulating assignment let me have fun with the equations and express what the data really reveals. Finally the narrative puts the data created through the equations into a written statement. Being able to use and manipulate data in Excel can prove to be useful in a wide variety of situations. I personally have used this program for market research, a wedding guest list, homework outlines, and a household budget. By teaching the students this program and the variety of ways it can be used, they will be able to use it in so many different ways in the future.

Formatting
Manipulating
Narrative

Rubistar - a day late

Unfortunately I did not get this assignment completed on time. It didn't take long to actually do the assignment, but life seemed to get in the way this week. I imediately knew what I was going to base my rubric on since I have been grading assignments in the clinical assignment. This rubric would be used to grade assignments completed in Microsoft Excel. Students are required to follow the 5 case assignments at the end of the chapter and the results should look identical to the final example given in the book. All assignments consist of primarily numbers and entering one number incorrectly will cause three other numbers in the spreadsheet to be incorrect.

I liked what Rubistar had to offer and it makes creating rubrics amazingly easy and I know that I will be bookmarking this website to use when I do teaching in the future. Creating a rubric when creating and grading assignments helps not only allows the students to know what is expected of them, but also allows the teacher to have a guideline as to the grading standards. This helps eliminate any vairation in how the assignments are graded.

Rubric

Movie Maker

This assignment was the worst so far. First, I was not expecting it to be the next assignment that was due, so as of Tuesday morning, when I received the email about the change of schedule, I had not even started working on it. I already had the program installed on my computer, so that was not a problem. However, when trying to actually create the movie, I encountered more problems than I was capable of handling. After the program was open for about five minutes my computer would shut down completely. Finally I had to start timing myself and make sure that I saved what I had finished before the computer shut down. In order to completely finish the movie I restarted my computer over twenty times. Not exactly my idea of a pleasurable evening of exploring technology.

If this program ever worked properly, I think it would be a good device to use in order to present information to my students. The program itself was not hard to use, if I could just get it to work for more than five minutes at a time. I have used other similar programs in the past and although Movie Maker was simple to use, I feel that I could do more with a different program.



*** MOVIE MAKER ***

PDF

Exporting my presentation as a PDF was so simple. I didn't even have to do anything. Simply upload it to GoogleDocs and publish it. This type of file will be quite useful for sending the document to someone that may not have PowerPoint or when printing it out. I chose to use my Jeopardy game for this assignment, so in the end I lost quite a bit of the effect from the original presentation. The slides are presented in numerical order and the viewer is not able to choose a hyperlink in order to view a corresponding answer and question. This form of file also allows the creator of the document to ensure that it cannot be edited by anyone who may view the file. I know that it is also common practice for documents or items that are scanned into the computer to be saved as PDF files. Items such as articles from a magazine, pages from a book, newspaper clippings, or flyers. I have used this type of file routinely when doing reseach and other class assignments.

When opening a PDF file it launches Adobe Acrobat Reader. This program allows the user to view the document as well as print it. The user is able to zoom in or out on the document so reading it directly from the program is made easy, eliminating the need to print.

Jeopardy

This assignment was wonderful. I have a great deal of experience with Microsoft Office applications, but I had no idea that you could create a Jeopardy game that was so easy to use. I was excited to create the game using the information we are covering in out BCA I class during my clinical observation. The students are finishing up their first chapter in Excel and have previously covered Word. I decided to cover areas that they have learned thoughout the year which also included basic keyboarding. I can't wait to give this to my cooperating teacher and see if maybe we can find a way for the students to actually play the game. The only problem will be that there is no way for project the game onto a larger screen so that all students can see it. Perhaps we can split into teams and have the student take rounds where only one student on each team can answer a question. This way there would be at least a little control over the commotion that I'm sure would result from 20 students trying to play at the same time, even if they were split into teams.

As far as the actual process of creating the Jeopardy game. I have quite a bit of difficulty at the begining, but that was completely a result of my failing computer and my own stupid fault of not saving the work I had done. Finally, on the third try I was smart enough to save my work periodically. I find this a bit ironic seeing as how we repeatedly tell the students in class to save their work so they do not risk losing it should something happen to the computer or program.

Once I finally got working the process was quite easy. I did have a problem with two links where it would not go to the appropriate page, even after fixing the link several times. I finally deleted the entire link and started over with a new one. Changing the action button to a mouse over instead of a mouse click was simple, but cutting and pasting it onto each slide was tedious. If I were to be creating this type of powerpoint from scratch I would choose to copy and paste the entire slide to save time.

The only time I encountered a irritating problem when with trying to get it to connect to my blog. I saved the powerpoint as both a .ppt (power point) and a .pps (power point show). Saving it as a show is supposed to cause the powerpoint to open in the slideshow view so that the user does not see the individual slides or the formatting part of the program. When I open the file from 'my documents' or even directly from my ftp folder it works fine, but when I connect a link in my blog to the ftp file it opens in the program rather than the slide show. I don't understand what is going wrong. The file itself is a slide show, but it is not opening that way. It still works fine this way, but I would prefer to have it open directly into a slide show rather than open the program.

BCA I Jeopardy Game

Podcast

The first step I took toward creating my podcast was coming up with a topic. Initially, I thought it would be easy since so much of business education consists of technology, but then I realized it's not so easy to explain something about a program without being able to exactly point it out. I ended up deciding to do a podcast on the new Microsoft Office programs. Primarily focusing on just exploring the new layout of Microsoft Word. I wrote out my entire script, then realized that I hadn't yet even thought about how to record it. Since the initial instructions mentioned Audacity, I decided to try it out. I found it to be very user freindly and didn't have any problems with the program. My problem was primarily with me. I really aimed toward recording the entire script in one single shot, but ended up doing at least 30 recordings. Finally, I thought I would give it a shot one last time and made it most of the way though. I ended up deleting all the previous recordings and just using the last one. I guess after rehearsing those 30 times in addition to prior run throughs I had gotten a lot better at it. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to have two people speaking in the podcast or not, but I don't have anyone else around to help me with that. It is evident though, that two people could easily participate in the podcast I created.

In order to save my podcast and prepare it for posting, I exported it as a WAV document and downloaded a WAV MP3 converter. This was very easy to do once I found a decent converter to download. I did publish my podcast to podbean.com.

If you listen to my podcast, you may have noticed that it ends by saying to move on to Podcast #2. I have not created a second podcast, but I would like to. I think this is an amazing way introduce this type of material. I want to record several podcasts to eventually be used in my future classroom. Of course, by the time I have my own classroom to teach, I will have to start all over because WORD 2010 or something like that will probably be out and be completely different. The one thing that could possibly be considered a downfall (but at the same time a good thing) about teaching technology, is that sometimes the teacher is learning with the students. It's so hard to stay ahead of things. I know that I will continually be learning new things and will be teaching new things each year. I just hope I am able to teach a few business courses as well to hopefully keep me grounded with some consistant material. I can't wait to make more podcasts for my classes. Maybe I can create one for my clinical classes that I observe. I'll have to see if that would be possible.

Podcast

Script