Den's Blog

Clever Ways to Make Your Power Points Rise Above

2009-03-24T18:03:00.000-07:00

Hi, I'm Denise. I am a recent graduate from CSU Chico with a Bachelor's in Instructional Design. My main interest is in developing elearning.

Most recently I work for UC Davis Extension as an Instructional Designer/Course Developer for their Online Education group. We use Power Point with Articulate, a really cool program that allows the user to go beyond your normal Power Point presentation stuff. Needless to say, I have gotten pretty efficient with Power Point and I LOVE Articulate.

I thought I would share some of my latest creative tips on how to make your presentations more interesting and fun. By doing some of these things, your learners will actually get engaged in your presentations and most likely learn something too, which, we can all agree, is the goal of most everybody's presentations.

The first tip I would give is to come up with an interesting background. Not one of those that you select from Power Point, but one you can make easily enough in Power Point. Select a picture that will go well with your presentation (i.e., if it is on electricity, a picture of the ocean might not work so well - instead maybe a lightbulb or plug washed out a bit). Here's one I bought from IStock:

Once you find your picture, you can set it to watermark in Power Point. I have a Mac at home and am using Power Point 2004. You can find the watermark tool by going into your view menu at the bar on the top, scroll down to tools, and select Picture. Once that window comes up, select "image control" and then click on "watermark." Here is what that will look like after:

FYI - Articulate has many different options to choose from. After inserting the picture, you'll want to click on it and then choose the format tab on the top right. Once in the picture format area, click over on the picture options all the way to the left. There are many to choose from, so just click and watch what happens.

Also, this will set your color(s) for your presentation. If you have trouble matching colors to your background, you can always find websites to help you with that. One I like is called "kuler" powered by Adobe. You can just type in a color, say blue, in the search box and it will return several different swatches with blue and other colors that match. You'll want to play with the buttons at the bottom to find more colors. It's really nice. There are other good sites out there too, I just happen to like this one.

Once you have your background picture set the way you want, go into the slide master. Simply past the picture on the master slide. Make the picture as big (or bigger) as the slide so it fills up all the white space. For your title slide, you may want to add a bar with information. Here's what I did:

This is my master title page.

This is my slide master for all the other slides.

When you change your view from master back to normal, every slide will have this picture background and layout on it.

The Power Point background is now unique and yours. This makes your Power Point pop from the start. Your audience will notice right away getting their interest peaked. This is the first step in engaging your audience. Congradualations!

Welp, that's it for this time. I have a lot of other cool tricks up my sleeve and will share them with you in the time to come. I wish you the best of luck.

U-Verse, new technology from ATandT

2008-05-04T17:04:00.000-07:00

So for my blog this week, I decided to write about a new thing AT&T is doing called U-Verse. My brother was telling me about it because he works for the company and so I decided to look it up. It is a pretty cool service, but one that my small town won’t be receiving for a while.

Similar to Comcast, but less expensive, they offer an all-in-one package for TV, telephone, and Internet, however this deal is a little more high tech. It allows one to check your calls from your television and then return the call with a click of the remote, which is called Click to Call. Another cool feature my brother told me about was that, not only does it have DVR recording, but if you forgot to record something you can do it remotely from your cell phone which is somehow linked to your television DVR. They also have voice over Internet Protocol (voIP), which is nice as well.

These seem like great new features and something I would totally go for since right now we have AT&T with a super slow connection speed because of where we live. In California they just finished setting up Santa Rosa and are due to hook up Lake County soon. They only service the areas that have switched over to fiber optic phone lines, so this means they will concentrate on the bigger cities first before coming to the smaller areas.

This is a stretch from what I usually talk about, but it still involves social networking because of its opportunities through communication with others via the television, computer, and/or cell phone service. Anyway, I thought it was interesting, especially since my brother works for the company.

Here is a link so you can check it out if you are interested:

U-Verse

Second Life Field Assignment

2008-05-04T14:27:00.001-07:00

I took a few trips into Second Life. Some I did by myself, but most of them were with friends in the class. My experiences were different each time and depended on when and what time of day it was I went in. It seemed that on weeknights in the evenings a lot of people hung around orientation island public. I went there as I wrote this on Sunday and there was a smaller crowd. Most people were chatting and not talking. This was the most interesting place for me. I loved to just hang out and listen to what others were talking about. I realized on Sunday that many of them are from Europe. They just hang out and talk about things that don’t matter.

One evening my friends and I went to a dance club and learned new dances. This was really fun and I had a great time watching and learning. The music was good and we all had fun. I then transported to Anteater Island where I wouldn’t stop dancing. I had told my avatar to stop before we left the dance club, but to no avail. It was pretty funny. Even after transporting to Virtual Hallucinations I was still dancing. Everyone was cracking up. My avatar on my screen was not dancing, however on other people’s computer I was. Must have been a glitch.

I enjoyed Second Life and everywhere I went. I especially enjoyed anteater island where we played laser tag, I went through a maze, and had the option of going up to a learning center of some sort.

We also went to Virtual Hallucinations. That was a trip! It is a place where you can see what it is like to be schizophrenic. There are voices in there that tell you what a terrible person you are and how you are dying. There was a gun on the table that said to kill all the police. This is supposedly what schizophrenics hear inside their heads. What a drag.

I also went to an amusement park and rode some rides. That was fun but was hoping to get on a roller coaster. I think you might have to pay for that kind of thing.

I could see that this would be really fun for online learning. I was doing a report about nanotechnology and found nanotechnology island on Second Life. I didn’t know how to fly and work my avatar yet, so I didn’t get much out of it, but could totally see the potential for education. What fun this would be to learn from home on Second Life. It is interactive and allows you to do what you want when you want. I love it!

I also noticed that it takes a while to get comfortable moving around, flying and just getting to know how to make your avatar move. By watching what everyone was doing at orientation island public it makes one realize how many ways one can make their avatar gesture or sit. Many sit atop a fence or sign and swing their leg. I don’t know how this is done, but I am sure one day I will learn.

This is one place I probably will revisit when we are done with class. People watching alone is fun. And all the costumes….bizzare!

Genome and Social Networking

2008-05-01T16:13:00.000-07:00

So for this blog I decided to look for something new in social networking. What I found was a company from Mountain View, Ca called 23andMe that offers people comparisons of their DNA to others. They call it a personal genomics service.

This goes a little beyond social networking, but is kinda cool. You could compare your DNA with, say, your best friends’ or even someone famous. You could potentially find relatives out there you never knew existed. A member of 23andMe’s scientific advisory board, George Church, says “The idea has precedence in PatientsLikeMe, people who have been enabled to find one another by their disease. Here, people can find each other by their alleles (or genetic variations)(Singer).”

I didn’t realize it before, but I guess there are several other sites out there already that offer this service. This is just a new one coming out soon.

So the idea is you can pay $999 for a kit, send in a sample of your spit, and then receive around “600,000 genetic variations linked to disease and other factors, such as ancestry, height, and color (Singer).”

The main purpose of the site is to eventually get enough people to create a database that is big enough to “reveal scientifically and medically relevant information about its users (Singer).”

This is way out of my league money wise, but I could see the benefits of the site and their potential. It would be easier than doing genealogy that takes forever and a day on some ancestors. It would be especially handy when your gene line breaks and you can’t trace your family back any longer, which happened to my grandmother when she did ours. Also, it might be beneficial for the entire family if they all threw in some money so one person didn’t have to foot the bill, but then who’s spit would be turned in?

Kinda cool. Here’s the link if you want to check it out and read more about the idea:

Social Networking hits the Genome

Second Life Experience

2008-04-24T16:49:00.000-07:00

Last week my friend Lauren and I got on Second Life. It was pretty much my second time and Lauren had been on a long time ago. We were in two different locations when we started. I was placed on a learning island and could not seem to get off. I changed my appearance and walked around a little trying to learn new things I wasn’t able to do in the past. Finally I learned how to get to another learning island through our teacher’s help. Lauren landed there as well. I found my teacher, chatted with him and then started exploring this better island than what I was on (apparently there are several learning islands and one is placed randomly on one of these when first entering Second Life).

Lauren and I eventually hooked up. We had so much fun learning how to move certain ways and how to express ourselves. We were sitting across from one another and even did a dance together on the count of three. I learned how to sit down, how to talk via the talk button so Lauren could actually hear me and I her, how to fly, and many other things as well.

We had so much fun. We both were supposed to meet my husband after class for drinks and we ended up being late. We stayed about fifteen minutes past our regular time that we get out because we had so much fun. Class usually gets out way earlier than that.

I learned many new things there and look forward to learning even more this week when we try it again. I know it is not a game, but it feels like it in that if I ever had to learn new things or take a class in Second Life, I would absolutely love it. It does take some time to feel comfortable walking and doing things, but it is just too much fun and can’t wait to do it again. I find that it could become somewhat addictive.

Online Gaming offers Social Networking positives

2008-04-17T18:28:00.000-07:00

I was searching for new social networking tools when I came across this article titled “Online games meet social networking tools” from a USA Today online article written around 5 months ago. What I liked about it was that a 41-year old lady used the Internet to play a game called Kaneva (never heard of it before) and loves it for socializing. It sounds similar to Second Life (even though it’s not a game) in that she runs a virtual nightclub and hosts parties in the game. She says “it helps her interact with people, not provide escape from them as traditional games often do (Slagle).”

This struck me as a pleasant difference than what we usually hear about how gaming keeping us from socializing with people because it isn’t face to face. Because a lot of people play these types of games instead of watching television or using other media, the people who partake in this type of activity could be considered to be socializing more than they would otherwise.

I had never thought of socializing like this before. One could say they were socializing when playing online games like WOW or other similar games because they are chatting with each other and actually socializing, even though it might be about the game itself. These people are doing more socializing than I am when watching television in the evening, right?

There is always a lot of negative talk about how online gaming keeps people from actually socializing. For once they talk about how we would not be socializing regularly anyway, so evening online gaming is a good way to socialize. I don't know, I just feel they are absolutely right, at least for me. It doesn't make me not want to socialize at all. I am a social butterfly in real life. Online gaming is fairly new to me and I don't do much of it, but not because I don't want to; because I haven't had time since going to college. I am looking forward to doing more of this type of thing after I graduate.

I like this different take on gaming. It’s nice to hear something positive come out of it.

Here is the link if you want to check out the article:

Online games meet social networking tools

YouTube Proposal

2008-04-13T16:55:00.000-07:00

I could see YouTube being used for promotional benefits for myself after I graduate. It would be a video of my resume, basically. I could videotape myself talking about my skills, my degree, my interests in both a career and hobbies, and my volunteer work I have done in the past.

I could then put it up on my website and share with potential employers as well as family and friends. With everyone having access to it, it may help me get a job quicker. This also would be another resource I would have for employers to get to know me better.

I haven’t seen any other promotional student-type YouTube videos. Even when I ran a search, I didn’t see any that were of students promoting themselves. It may be an untapped area that has potential.

I think it would be fairly simple to produce. I could set up a tripod and videotape the whole thing by myself, or have one of my family members or friends videotape it for me. I might play some light background music to jazz it up a bit. When I edit it in imovie, I could cut in scenes such as showing my diploma, have words come in stating what my degree is in, and show pictures of some of my work, my skills, and my hobbies. I would design the script to go along with my pictures and talk in the background explaining what the things they are seeing are.

I think this would be a wonderful asset to my website as well as something fun and creative for my potential employers to watch. It would show them just how innovative I could be. I am not sure if I could produce it before classes are over, but I think I might try to get it done shortly after graduation if not before.

YouTube

2008-04-02T20:56:00.000-07:00

I love YouTube. It is entertaining to watch the funny videos that are out there. People do some crazy things. I remember one of the first ones I watched was a girl lip sinking some song (sorry, I can’t remember which one it was). It wasn’t the song so much as it was how she was singing it. It was hilarious. I was hooked after that.

I also like how it is being used more and more by politicians this year. This is the most fun I have ever had during a political campaign. I love seeing the jokes about Hillary and Obama, all the new music and support for Obama that has come out of YouTube, and just the new feel of how campaigning has become. People are doing things because they want to help. It is more real than having all the rich people and other politicians buy who they want to win. It seems to be more about what the people want this time. We can see this in all the new music videos out there that musicians were not paid to make or asked by any politician. They just did it to get the message across about who they want to win. Then they put it up on YouTube for everyone to view. I don’t know, it just seems to be less of “whoever has more money will win” and more of “look what I think about this politician” which, for me, makes it more about the public deciding.

I think businesses could use it more and this is an area that seems to be untapped so far. I know I would try to use it to my benefit if I were a business owner or consultant. I think I would try to make it funny so it would grab peoples attention and get spread around. The comical ones are what I enjoy and seek out the most. It’s kind of like the funny commercials during the Super Bowl; it’s half the reason some of us watch the game.

Social Network Profile Analysis

2008-04-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

The purpose and focus of my profiles on the two sites and then the twittering I do occasionally are to let my friends, new acquaintances, and potential employers get to know me better. I have written all of these sites so that any and all of these people can read and hopefully enjoy learning more about me.

My audiences so far are other colleagues mostly. Just a few are starting to come in to My Space that I didn’t meet in college. All of my twitter friends are from college and in fact were the ones who turned me on to it. I enjoy it, but don’t get to it as often as they do. I think now that I am using it more, I may invite more people to join with me and seek out others outside of college.

The three services are different; especially twitter. My Space, from what I have gathered so far, allows much more creativity than the others. I love that you can change the background and add music that you like. This may be the reason many like this service. Facebook is good if you don’t want to mess with all of that creativity. Lots of my friends are on that one, so I may end up using that more than My Space. Twitter I try to get to at least once a day, but find it hard because of the demands of my life. I guess this is true with all of these social networking sites.

Personally, I prefer My Space over all the others. Twitter is easy and fun if one has the time. This is probably my second favorite. Facebook seems a little dull so far, but maybe I haven’t learned about it enough. Maybe there is more creativity to it than I realize. So far it is my least favorite.

I think users would choose My Space if they want to be more creative, Twitter if they just want to chat randomly, and Facebook if they just want a social networking tool that is easy to use. Of the three sites that I chose, I believe the main thing that makes people choose a particular site is if their friends are on that space.

All of these social networking sites are new to me and I am glad I am forced to try them out. I am having a good time learning the new technology and look forward to exploring each one further.

Social Networking in Wikis

2008-03-27T18:44:00.000-07:00

Wow! This social networking thing is going crazy! Even wikis are adding social networking tools.

This week I went looking for new social networking tools and found that a company called Wetpaint (which offers free wikis to people) are starting to take steps to provide people with “fully-functional social networks with the release of several new features that are typically found on social networking sites (Nicole).” What once was only used as a resource for enterprise solutions is now siding more towards feeds which will allow users to communicate with one another more easily. They plan to place this right in their dashboard making it hard to resist talking to others when they are online.

Another thing they are doing is adding in a “friends invite option” so people can invite others into their wikis. This is supposedly so that the friends can help contribute to the wiki the user is currently working on at the time.

An option they will provide is a compliments area so friends and foes alike can tell a wiki writer if they like it or not. This is useful from the standpoint that if one is not the authority on a subject and they insist on writing about it, an authority could come in and straighten out any misgivings the original writer may have had. Of course they hope this will be a place where people can encourage others so wikis become more popular, but I am not sure that is all that will happen.

A lot of people are asking if the social networking area is really necessary for wikis. I am just getting familiar with wikis within this past year, so I really can’t give my solid opinion of whether it is a good or bad thing. However, generally speaking from what I do know, I don’t see that it could hurt. It is at least worth trying, right?

Here's the link to the article

Keeping your stuff private

2008-03-12T21:03:00.000-07:00

This week I chose to write about how ones image on a social networking site reflects who they are and how this image, if bad, can come back to haunt you.

I have read in the news that recruiters from major companies look on sites such as MySpace and Facebook for potential job candidates (link to the article: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6522523). Keeping this in mind, I believe it is important to keep your social spaces as “clean” as possible. It is important also to let the viewers see who you are as a person, but keep the crazy stuff for a picture album in your house where one can pull it out only when it is appropriate.

So, you may think this is silly. No one can view your site that isn’t invited and therefore your “crazy” pictures are safe, right? This is not true. People that one invites into their site as “friends” can take the pictures off of their site and either post them on their own for others to see or pass them on to others. This happened to one of my friends. She had to request the other person to take the picture off of his site. He reluctantly agreed, but who knows where it went before he removed it.

Keeping ones social networking sites clean and professional will help with ones career in the long run. Professionals are looking at potential candidates through these sites. It is important to keep this in mind while creating and maintaining social networks. Just because one has something posted doesn’t mean it will stay with them and only them. These pictures may eventually come back to haunt you someday when you least expect it.

Should we allow “worthless content” on the web?

2008-03-05T21:27:00.000-08:00

Yes, I believe we should. I wrote about this in my last blog and had one comment that pretty much disagreed with me and another who thought my point about porn and kids was a good one (see below). So let’s talk more about it.

I would like to defend my position on saying, “Should people be allowed to create music on their own without record companies and the like regardless of the quality? Sure. Why not? What will happen? We won’t listen to it or we will because it is so terrible."

I interpret Keeny’s point below as saying the record companies and the like are not doing a great job of getting rid of the junk just like the internet is not doing the job. Keeny believes we should let others take charge and get rid of the junk so there is more competition (that’s my interpretation of this argument). Keeny’s point is, the competition would become even greater because it would be the good against the better (right?).

I understand what Keeny is saying, but I still hold true to my belief that if we leave everything the way it is now, the bad will eventually be weeded out and we will be left with the good against the better, but under our own terms and when we are ready. In this situation, the content left on the web will be up to us, not others trying to steer us their way. We should be able to decide what is good or bad. This is art and can only be recognized as “good” or “bad” in the eyes of the beholder, not government officials deciding for us what is art and what isn’t.

I think the best way to explain my point is to try to imagine if one were a songwriter who wanted to see if ones songs were good, maybe even good enough to think about starting a singing/songwriting career. Putting ones music on YouTube could help with this decision and would be less time consuming and cost free. Going to a record company would cost precious time and lots of money with the chance of being turned down even though the actual music might be popular with the public (kind of like the last major election so many were upset with – the popular vote did not win). Let the public decide, not the government.

Thanks for reading :D

Abundance of "worthless" content on the web...

2008-02-22T11:42:00.000-08:00

After our New Telecom Technologies class last week when we virtually experienced Brian Reich talk about the abundance of “worthless” content (an excellent virtual experience, by the way), I have thought a lot about this is true statement and just how we as a population should handle the problem (if we need to “handle” it at all). In class last night, we watched a video by Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law, which addressed similar issues (again, this too was interesting).

My opinion is much like Reich’s in that yes, there is a lot of junk out there now, but I believe it will eventually take care of itself. It is a typical routine we go through with many things that are new to us, especially technology, as history has shown us in the past. Since the technology is fairly new to us, we don’t know how to use it to our full advantage yet, and therefore it is chaotic now. Eventually, however, we, as a population, culture, whatever you want to call it, will weed through the mess and only watch or see only what we want to see eliminating the rest of the junk out there just as we did with many technological gadgets that were all the craze. Television was similar when it first came out and even now. There is a lot of garbage on TV, but we only watch what we want eventually eliminating the bad. We buy into the hype of new things at first, and then eventually it dies down.

I also feel like right now with so much stuff on the Internet, it is an opportunity to allow people to gain their voice, if you will. Allowing people to do whatever they want creatively (which some of it is extremely creative and good in my opinion) now when we are experimenting is an opportunity for those who have some creativity to let it out and share it with us. It is art that right now everyone wants to express in his or her own way.

Should this be allowed? Should people be allowed to create music on their own without record companies and the like regardless of the quality? Sure. Why not? What will happen? We won’t listen to it or we will because it is so terrible. If it doesn’t hurt anyone, why should we care? This is a great way to see if audiences are interested in your music before you leave your day job, right?

What about porn and other things that our kids can look at when we aren’t watching, some even becoming addicted to it? Sure, this is not good and I certainly don’t condone it. However, I feel it is the parent’s responsibility to know what your kids are doing, not the government’s, FCC’s, or anybody else’s for that matter. Parents are responsible for their children. If they can’t watch them every second of the day, then talk to them about the problems and issues out there on the web. Being aware of what they can do and then talking about it openly is half the battle. Kids are going to do what they want when they want it no matter what. It’s like sex. The best one can do is talk to them about their responsibility. After that, it’s up to them.

To sum up my beliefs, I believe we should leave what we have now alone. It will take care of itself without the help from government officials or anyone else. Too often we ask the government to help us out on issues that they really have no business in because we are scared of what could happen. In this case, I agree with Reich and Lessig that things are crazy right now, but we as a culture will clean it up on our own. Once restrictions are in place, we will loose so much creativity and art. Free speech is what we as a country are all about. Let our voices be heard. Leave this alone for once. Eventually things will take care of themselves.

2nd post - New Social Networking Tool: Gypsii

2008-02-15T17:39:00.000-08:00

Oh my gosh. I have just read about a new service that allows a person to track where their friends are through their cell phones. It is a new social network site that was just released in Barcellona, Spain and is called “Gypsii”. So, you could be in California and your friend, Sam, could be in New York. You could then track him on a little map on your cell phone. The map they showed on the article had a bunch of pins pointing to where the “friends” were at that time. It looked as if when you scrolled over the pin, the name of the friend would pop up as well as their location. This information could also be transferred to your facebook or myspace page to share with other friends if one was so inclined.

The article, “'Friend locator' could become next craze for social networkers,” said that Gypsii was only available for “top-end phones,” which I assume to be the blackberries and iphones. In any case, one can be pretty sure that it won’t be long before this technology will be available to every kind of phone and eventually become affordable.

My thing that I love is new technology. Social networking is a newer technology that has its benefits. What I love about this Gypsii software is that it allows people to see where their friends are, say, if one is going out on the town and wants to meet up with their peeps. They can just view their map and see that everyone is at the local pub or that Nick is having an impromptu party at his house (hopefully you were invited or they just forgot!).

I thought this was a pretty cool article. Here is the link if you want to check it out for yourself.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080213/tc_afp/lifestyleinternettelecomsocial2_080213172258

First post

2008-02-07T15:47:00.001-08:00

Hey out there,

This is my very first blog. I am in a very interesting class that has me learning to blog once a week or so for one hour. This class is learning about personal web spaces. I hope to use this to my benefit for my IDT degree. I hope that it will help me understand better how Generation M (people between the ages of 15 and 25) use their computer and network with each other. This should help me in my field after I graduate.

Just a note: I had another blog up here before, but am going to change it a little per the guidelines of the class requirements.

So, here it goes. I will be blogging about new social networking technologies or things of that nature. This can be anything that is new out there technology-wise or some fun blogs that I find interesting because of my interests that will help me social network with people I don’t know, but who also have the same interests. It may also contain information about new technology in general and where that is going (which I believe is up, up, and farther up as the future unfolds).

Just for your information, I love technology, especially new technology. I have a strong desire to learn how to use much of what is offered out there today and express a real love for anything new in this area (like faster computers, iphones, digital cameras, etc.). If it is out there, I would love to get my hands on it and try it out, even new software.

With that said, I am off and running to find new social networking tools. I hope you enjoy my blog!