Advice for New Students Taking CS1300 Next Semester

Don't ever miss a class! For real, you would regret it. I missed two classes the whole semester; one was because I was sick and the other one was due to an exam that I have to study for and it directly reflected in my grade. Its easier to learn stuff in class.

Student Websites

I really liked HyeWon's site. It was colorful and had a lot of pictures of some good times. She used the color purple a lot on the background which can catch the audiences attention pretty quick. Another one that I liked was John's. It was simple but in a good way. He gave information about his family and the sports that he does. He is into sports a lot just like me which made his site more interesting to me because I always love reading stuff about sports. Erin's was pretty good too, including a lot of picture. She modified most of her pictures on photoshop which made them look better. Overall I liked all the websites that have been presented today!

Please visit my own website at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~usonmez.

PowerPoint Presentations-2

I think the best presentation on Tuesday was Taylor Burden's, about D-Day. The best part of it was the music on the background which was very appropriate for the topic. Starting from my childhood, I was always interested about historical events and especially the wars after 1900s. The dark background color and the style of typing was related to the topic. On the other hand, he used great pictures and maps about this historical event.

PowerPoint Presentations

I think everyone did a great job on their presentations and I liked all of them. People really put some solid effort preparing these presentations about stuff that they are interested in. I really liked Eduardo Bilbao's presentation about Rio de Janerio, Brazil. First of all I'm really interested in soccer and the thing he said about Rio is so true; all the great soccer player's start playing it at the streets of Rio, that is a real fact. Besides he used great pictures of the beaches to present Rio to the audience. Another one that I liked was Staci Robinson's presentation about Environmental Science. She talked about recycling and that's an issue which everyone should be interested in. Her use of animated gif was very appropriate and the bright colors increased the effect of the point that she tries to make: a "greener" world.

Power Point

PowerPoint presentation is a very effective way to present your ideas, if you know how to use it well. It's amazing how often people just gets up in front of the class and just read their slides. Anyone can do that, the presenters should prepare a lot before their presentation, in order to do it well and fluent, so it would get the listener's attention. Handing out papers would distract the listeners too because they would concentrate on the papers that you handed out, not your presentation. The most crucial part, people should know that they should not use clip arts and sound effects that are available in Power Points database because they are really annoying for most of the people.

Five important guidelines for a good PowerPoint Presentation:
-The presenter should not read directly from the slides, any one can do that
-The main reason for presentations are showing your emotion by your body language to the audience, which makes it easier for them to understand your point of view.
-Try to have an interesting start to your presentation so you would get people's attention
-Do not write too much stuff on a single slide, more than the reader can read and always support it with visual elements, such as pictures and graphs
-Cue cards are crucial

Microsoft Excel

To be a honest, before taking this class I totally forgot how to do stuff on Microsoft Excel because I learned how to use it when I was in middle school and never need it afterwards; however, now that I'm thinking on majoring accounting, it is going to help me a lot. Some of my friends that are taking or took the accounting five year program told me that all they do at the beginning of their career as an accountant is that they basically sit in front of a computer and due various kinds of stuff on Excel, so I'm very glad that I failed the computer skills exam at the beginning of the year and ended up taking this course. I learned a lot of features that would help me a in my future such as all different kinds of formulas, graphs, drop cap and many others. I forgot most of the stuff that we covered in class when I was in middle school but now I'm pretty sure that I can do most of the stuff in Excel, after taking this course.

Field Trip to CLT

Today was the first time that I've seen the CLT, I did not have any clue where it was,the first floor of the library. The best part of CLT is that you can go down whenever you want and you would always ask questions about latest programs such as web designing and photoshop. One can easily improve his skills by hanging at CLT. On the other hand, we can check out digital cameras and other equipments from CLT, but we have to tell our instructor to inform the people before so that we would easily check the material out.