Advice for new students taking CS1300 next semester

My advice to get a good grade in this course is to DO YOUR WORK and PAY ATTENTION IN CLASS.
If you follow this advice there is absolutely no reason for any of you to not get the grade you want. Enjoy this course and learn as much as you can because everything that we cover in class is interesting and helpful.

Students Websites

I was really impressed with everybody's websites because they all looked great and were very interesting. My 3 favorite websites were:

1. Lauren's Website
2. Sarah's Travel Bucket List
3. The Hustings of Texas

Lauren's website had many pictures and I was able to learn a lot of about her. Her layout was very interesting and really caught my attention.
Sarah's Travel Bucket List was amazing! I personally want to travel all over the world and her last website part where she talks about studying abroad really made me want to learn more.
Deanna's website about her family was really nice. She did a great job organizing a page for each of her family members and all of the pictures were great.

It was really hard deciding what my favorite websites were because they were all really great.

I made a website! :)

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~kgarcia1 !

I can't believe that I created a website! The website I decided to make is called CUPCAKE WORLD because I just LOVE cupcakes! I learned to bake when I was only 5 years old at my grandmother's house and cupcakes have always been my specialty. Making my site was easier than I thought thanks to Microsoft Expression Web. The section that I am the most proud of is my nav bar because I created it in Adobe Photoshop. When I first used Adobe Photoshop I was a little nervous, but I am really happy that I learned so many useful tools in this class. Something that I changed in my website was making the pictures a little smaller because they were way too large! My biggest technical challenge was figuring out how to change the title on each section, but a classmate helped me figure that out. My biggest design challenge was making sure the pictures were the right size and designing a good layout. I will show this site to all of my family and friends because I know that they will be very proud of me. I think that I will definitely make another site for another class in the future especially since I am studying business.

Advice we got from Larry Hechler

 For today’s class Larry Hechler, Hardware Technitian Supervision at the Information Technology Services, talked to us about computer hardware and all of the information he gave us was new to me since I didn’t know much before. I had a hard time understanding everything he was saying because some of the terms I wasn’t familiar with, but he gave us a  lot of useful tips. Something that I found very important was that hand creams are destructive to LCD screens so it is crucial that we don’t touch our computer and laptop screens with our hands. I also learned that I should never clean the screen with anything that includes alcohol, acetone, chloride bleach or ammonia. If we do so the screen can suffer some major damage and it can become very difficult to read because it will become cloudy. I learned to never spray directly into the screen, but spray into a cloth. Liquids and computers never mix at all, so always make sure to be careful and avoid having drinks around when you are using the computer. Last but not least I learned that back up is critical!! If you care about it put it somewhere else besides hard drive. For my next computer purchase I am going to make sure that I get informed about coverage plans because I learned that Dell has a really good one.

Powerpoint Presentation

The topic I chose for my powerpoint presentation was Youth Entrepreneurship. My major is Business and since I am a first-year student there isn't a lot that I have learned, but I am really looking forward to next semester. The reason why I chose to talk about Youth Entrepeneurship is because I think that a lot of young people have really amazing and unique ideas, but they do not know of all the funding opportunitites that exist out there to help them get started NOW! I was truly blessed  to recieve the Texas Youth Entrepeneurship Award as a high school senior and this is how I met numerous succesful entrepeneurs that are currently in college at the same time that they are managing their businesses. It was during my research for this presentation that I learned that there are other funding opportunities and the importance of spreading the word to other young entrepeneurs about these opportunities. What I would have changed about my presentation is to maybe include more facts and information, but I just had a hard time working with the 3 minute time frame which was really limited.

My two favorite powerpoint presentations from my classmates were Deanna's and Paige's because they really caught my attention. I was impressed by how well they managed to organize their layouts and design styles to really catch the audiences attention. Their topics were both really interesting and made me want to learn more.

Here is the video that I used for my presentation! :)

Pictures That Lie

Using Adobe Photoshop Elements and some of the techniques we have learned in class I manipulated the picture above. I chose the picture of a mother with her three children riding bikes and a NO CARS sign to show the message that "Parents should teach their children to GO GREEN." The reason why I chose to convey this message through a picture is because I think that photo fakery should be used in a positive way rather than negative. The picture originated from a photographer's website who did a photoshoot of this family. I manipulated the picture by adding the NO CARS symbol to the bicycle's wheels. I think that this maniuplation was not harmful because it is carrying a positive message across.

The article I read was titled Computer as Accessory to Photo Fakery. It basically talked about how the computer software that is available today has allowed for a lot of people to be able to manipulate photographs. I agree with the article that photo fakery is often used in harmful ways by the media, but overall it is a positive thing to be able to use this technology during our daily lives. It was stated in the article, "The advent of the computer has taken much of the hard work out of convincing fakery." Yes, it is true that some people might take advantage of this to do negative things and carry negative messages, but it has also allowed many people to come up with creative ways to show positive messages to others. This is why I chose to maniuplate my picture so that it would carry a message about "Going Green" and showing the younger generations the importance of taking care of our environment.

Citation

BROWNE, MALCOLM W.. "Computer as Accessory to Photo Fakery." New York Times, The (NY) 24 Jul. 1991, Late Edition - Final, National Desk: 6. NewsBank. Web. 4 Apr. 2011.

Chris Nolan's Presentation on Searching the Internet

For today’s class, Chris Nolan who is the Assistant University Librarian came to talk to our class about searching the internet. It was interesting to learn that all of my classmates use Google as their main search engine and about 2/3 of users in the United States use google as well. I was glad to learn about the advance

search in google because I had never used it before. What I found to be really useful is the ability to find .gov or .edu sites only by typing this under “Search within a site or domain”. I had also never used Google Scholar, but I don’t think I will start to do so because we learned that it is similar to a database search but a lot of the articles don’t provide the full text for free unlike in our schoool’s library website.