Dream Team

To end the year, students will be working on parts of a book I am writing. It is a computer applications simulation titled "The Dream Team". Students will create a sports franchise of their choice and need to create documents in Word, Excel, PPT, and Access. They will design a logo, business card, uniforms, create a roster, salary and stat sheets with charts, and much more.

Problems, Problems, Problems!

The world is full of problems. Pollution, global warming, terrorism, the list goes on and on. Students need to choose a world problem to research. They need to gather facts, figures, pictures, and one video clip. Using Movie Maker, which comes free with Windows, students need to put all of their research together to make a movie about the topic they are researching. The movie will be set to music and show the research they have collected. To add a personal touch, using the digital video camera, they will also need to record and introduction and conclusion for their movie starring themselves.

The finished products will be shown to the entire class. Not only are students learning more about Movie Maker and Internet research, but they learn how to save video clips off of sites such as YouTube and even convert those files to use in various Microsoft products that we use in class.

The students have a lot of fun with this project and the results are great!

Absolutely Excel!

It is our last time through Excel this semester. Students are learning all about absolute cell references and the IF function. These are really important concepts when creating advanced spreadsheets. We are also learning more about formatting the charts that are created, especially 3-D pie charts. We will be working on these concepts for the next week before saying "Goodbye!" to Excel for the year.

Resumes and Cover Letters

Now that the last Hero Presentation has been given, it is time to dive back into Word for one last time this semester. Students will be learning about resumes and cover letters in class this week. They are learning how to use templates for resumes and how to create personalized letterhead for the cover letters. Students will finish this unit by creating their own resume and personalized letterhead.

Calling All Heroes!

Students are working on the Heroes Project this week. They need to select a famous person in history, research the person, create a 10-15 slide presentation, and present to the class. In addition, students need to create a newsletter using Word on their hero also.

Making Movies!

This week has been spent working with the programs Audacity and Movie Maker. Audacity is a simple audio editor available free on the Web. Movie Maker is the basic video program that comes standard with Windows. Students are currently working on creating a one minute movie on the topic of their choice. It needs to include digital pictures, graphics, at least one video clip, and sound effects or music. The finished product can be played on Windows Media Player.

Back from spring break!

Welcome back from spring break! Before we left, students were working on finishing up a unit on PowerPoint 2007. We were focusing on such things as slide transitions and custom animation. Each year students move up to the high school knowing more and more about creating slide shows with PowerPoint and it is getting difficult to find things to keep them excited, but we will keep trying.

Now that we are back, we worked on creating Top Ten databases for our top ten favorite songs and movies. Students had to create separate tables for each with a variety of related fields. We even included CD cover art that displayed in our database forms.

The rest of the week we will work on graphics editing using Fireworks. We will learn how to touch up digital photos with a lesson called "Zits and Red-eye." We will also introduce Movie Maker and a sound editor called Audacity. Fun stuff!

From Word to Excel

Students this week are finishing up a unit in Word. We have been discussing MLA format and the different features in Word 2007 that you can use when working with research papers. A great new tool in Word 2007 is the Source Manager under the "Reference" tab. If you haven't used it, definitely try it! We will be moving on to a unit in Excel that discusses several different functions, more charting options, and conditional formatting.

Welcome to my blog!

Thanks for stopping by! My hope is to begin with a weekly post to update students, parents, and other interested parties about what has been going on in my classes. Please feel free to make comments, I enjoy the feedback most of the time.