Know your limits

Posted on September 23, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Today a couple of the neighbor kids were playing in our house.  One of them asked to use a computer to feed his Webkinz.  This particular little guy just started kindergarten.  I was interested in seeing what he could do on his own.

I pointed him to our second grader’s computer.  He double-clicked “e” on the desktop.  The computer went to some Barbie page.  Without flinching, he opened the favorites and found the Webkinz icon in the listing.  A few seconds later he was logged in with his username and password.

He fed his “pet” and asked if it was ok to play his favorite Webkinz game.  I asked him what his favorite game was.  He pointed to the link at the bottom of the page.  I asked him the name of the game. 

Without missing a beat he looked at me and said, “I don’t know.  I can’t read.”

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Animoto

Posted on September 22, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Here is a free, web-based, easy to use movie creator that doesn’t have a lot of options.  The emphasis is on ease of use.

Give Animoto a few of your pictures.  Select a song from the techno-pop list available on the site and Animoto will put in the effects and transitions for your very own movie.

Your kids (if they are very young) and your parents (if they are older) may think it is cool.  The lack of a creative component doesn’t make it useful for many educational purposes, but if you don’t know how to create a movie and have a few pictures… it’s pretty easy to use.

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Confusing Choices

Posted on September 21, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Word processing is about preparing a document for some sort of publication.  There are many parts to word processing, but the basics include formatting text, controlling page layout and inserting external objects such as graphics.

When learning how to use a word processor, one should already know how to type.  When I teach word processing, I give my class a few hundred pages of a classic work (something out of copyright) and have them format the document in a specific way: fonts, line spacing, margins, page numbers, a few graphics.  We start with an ASCII text file, usually from Project Gutenberg.

Here is the step that usually sinks one or two students.  When an ASCII text file is saved using Word, this cryptic message pops up.

YourFile.txt may contain features that are not compatible with Plain Text format.  Do you want to save the document in this format?

To save, click Yes.
To preserve formatting, click No.  Then save a copy in the latest Word format.

Most people that get this message will click “Yes”.  After all, I want to save my file.  I have been formatting this thing for an hour so I certainly want to save my file.  How can I go wrong by pressing “Yes” to save my file?

“Yes” will save the file as an ASCII file.  ASCII files can’t contain formatting (fonts, line spacing, margins, page numbers, a few graphics).  In other words, if you take the time to format a text file and then save it as a text file, you will only have the file you started with and no formatting at all.

The correct thing to do is Save As and select “Word” as the document format.  This retains all the formatting.  If you don’t go with the “Save As” option, chances are you will become another victim of that confusing message from Microsoft and end up right where you started.

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Full Screen

Posted on September 20, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I’ve been observing my students as they work in our lab.  We have a nice setup with 30 new wide screen iMacs.  The machines have OS X and Windows XP.  The screens are big: 24 inches wide.  The screens are so big, if you have a document open using the full screen you literally have to turn your head from side to side to read it.

Most programs open full screen by default.  It is not uncommon for a user to have two or three programs open at once; all the details of an assignment are in a browser while Word is used to complete the assignment.  With each program filling the screen, the user must switch back and forth between different programs.  Most of them do not use the Alt-Tab cool switch, so add the time it takes to use the mouse to click on those small buttons at the bottom of the screen.  It especially annoying when Word is in full page view because the page only takes up the center of the screen.  Literally half of the screen is unused dead space on each side of the document.

During yesterday’s activity in class there was one student who resized two program windows so that each took up half of the screen.  One window was Word and the other was a browser.  Both were perfect sizes for working.  That student also was the first to finish the activity, finishing twenty minutes before the next student.

By the way, if you are working with multiple programs and you want to quickly maximize your screen usage without overlapping windows, try allSnap.

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Office 2010

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

One of my classes has a test tomorrow so my office hours were busier than normal today. One of the students asked a fairly basic question which was followed by a, “because it’s completely different in Office 2007. I learned how to do it in Office 2003.”

If you haven’t used Office 2007, you may not know that it is radically different than Office 2003.  In fact, until Office 2007, the product interface was almost unchanged for ten years.  The new menu ribbon takes some getting used to, but is more intuitive than the old static menu bar (if you are a new Office user).

Once I showed my student where the setting was in the new interface, everything was fine.  Then I told him that he would be using a different program when he started his first teaching job in four years.  By then Office 2010 will certainly be out and everyone will be switching to it.

Learning how to learn has never been more important.  It is especially true in technology where one can expect a new office suite or operating system every couple of years.  This year we got both at the same time.

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