Week 4, Communicaion

Lecture
This week's lecture was on ways to communicate using a computer. We were shown different types of Email clients, instant message clients, discussion board/forums, blogs and wiki webs. Most of these examples I had already used before, so I already had a lot of knowledge on each.

Tutorial
In our tutorial we had our blogs looked at just to see if we were on the right track. Justine didn't get around to seeing my blog, but I think I'm on the right track. We also had to visit Google and search for a topic of our choice in groups. My topic was my favourite T.V show Will and Grace. I found a discussion board called Urbana Grace United Methodist Friend . It didn't look like a very interesting discussion board, so I had a little read of what people had posted, but there wasn't anything very interesting.
The potential benefits of podcast in a university is that it's helpful if you cant make a lecture and you know it was an important one, you can go online and download the lecture so you don't miss anything. Also even if you are at a lecture but you found you missed a lot, you could always download the lecture and listen to it again on your way home from uni.

Readings
The reading 14 Email Do and Donts was a good reading to look at. It was helpful to see how you should ask for something in a way which will always sound nice on the other end. Most of the time when sending an email you just forget about punctuation and grammar, which is not a good thing if your sending an email to a tutor and they think you are coming across a little pushy.

Week 3, Presentation Strategies

My Presentation on Marine Life







Top 5 Strategies
Start off confident
Keep Thesis Statement clear
Keep Presentation short rather then to long
Have a little humour
Interact with your audience

Lecture
This week's lecture was on Presentation Strategies. There are different types of ways you can present your work at a university standards. Most assignments whether oral or written have three main structures; introduction, body and conclusion. An introduction is just explaining in short what you are going to write about or talk about. The Body is your main ideas on the issue. You normally have three main points that you would go more into detail in your body. A conclusion is just a quick summary of what was said during your asignment. We were also shown a great program for oral presentations; Microsoft PowerPoint.

Tutorial
Our tutorial this week was on making our own short presentations using PowerPoint. We had five main points we had to include and our topic could be on anything we liked.My presentation was on Marine Life. I focused on my favourite animals; dolphins, sharks and whales.
We also had to make a list of five strategies we would work on in a presentation to help us achieve a great standard of presentation.

Readings
This week's reading Oral Presentation Advice was very helpful. It basically showed us step by step what you should think about and follow when you are doing a presentation.It also had some good information on how you give a bad oral presentation. There were a couple of things in there that were going on my top five strategies on what not to do in my oral Presentation.

Week 2, Office Applications, Screen Captures

I had to put these in separate because I didn't know we needed them in

Week 2, Office Applications

Lecture
This week's lecture was about what Microsoft Office program to use for any assignment we produce during our university degree as well as real life circumstances. We were also shown a little information on what each program involves.

Tutorial
The two exercises for this week's tutorial were on Microsoft Word and Excel. The Microsoft Word exercise was about formatting our assignments in APA style, as well as showing us a little about references. Microsoft Excel was getting us to put digits into cells and inserting a formula, so that it calculates the sum of the numbers we inserted.

Readings
One of our readings was to help us do the Word exercise. It showed us step be step how to do each part of the exercise. We also had to learn how to do a screen capture and learn how to save it as a jpg. file. It also explained how to cut our screen shot so that we only have the important bit in our shot.

The reading Adobe Photo Shot was about each format you can save your image to. We are using the format jpeg, which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group. This format is used mostly for images off the Internet, because it keeps the image quality better.

Week one in UPC0004

Lecture
Our first lecture was simply an introduction to our unit, showing us what is involved.This lecture was really helpful in getting us to understand how the next semester was going to run.

Tutorial
Our tute on Tuesday got us to set up a blogger for our online journals and also photo bucket so we can work with photos. Justine also gave a quick run through of SIMO, Emails and MyECU.

I found capturing a screen shot quite difficult at first because I didn't actually know where the button was to take the screen shot. But after finding it the rest was pretty simple.

I read "How PC's Work" first because it seemed a lot more interesting. This reading was about getting to know your computer. It talks about all the different parts and how they fit in to the computer.

In "PC Lube and Tune" it was more about the history of the computer. Talking about how they have become what they are today.

First Screen Capture

My first Screen Capture