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.