My EDU 506 Course Portfolio Overview

I think that this was a very useful and applicable class.  I believe it’s one of the most practical classes that I’ve taken in all my undergraduate and graduate classes.  I am currently a high school math teacher and am using the programs we looked at in this class almost everyday.  Although I am using the programs almost everyday, I still learned new concepts and shortcuts that I never knew about.  I now am utilizing these ideas and sharing them with my colleagues and friends.

I’ve learned several things in this class, one being how you can format pictures and align them in Microsoft Word.  Usually when I format pictures in Word I would choose center because I didn’t really know/understand what left or right would do.  I’ve always wanted to get pictures to the left of my writing and I use to just move them myself, but aligning the picture to the left gives me the look I’ve wanted.  Further, I know that there have been times I’ve had difficulty with Word and its formatting.  When I want something single spaced and it’s programmed to be single spaced, but keeps giving me other types of spacing, I can press Shift-Enter simultaneously and it will bring the words down to the next line. This is a great tip and I use it often and even shared it with my mother when she was having difficulty with a project she was working on for work!  In terms of Microsoft Excel I’ve learned numerous things, the most important being the look-up function.  Our PowerPoint lesson informed me of a great deal of knowledge, because before that I have never had to use PowerPoint.  I learned how to create all my slides with the same format, insert action buttons, hyperlinks, and animation.  Lastly, FrontPage was a whole new program for me.  I hadn’t even heard of or known FrontPage before taking this class.  It was an interesting program that took some time getting use to all its features.  After many hours of playing around with FrontPage to get my website to look as I desired, I think I finally learned many of the tricks and trades of the program.  I would hope that if I ever have to use the program again that it would take me half of the time!

There were many things I liked about this class.  The first being our professor and his funny personality, he is always up for a good laugh.  Second, I found the material covered in this class to be very useful and applicable in our everyday lives.  Third, I liked the idea that there was NO homework (besides two weeks of homework assigned)!  And of course I loved getting out early, especially when the weather turned nice (getting done early with the course is also a plus!).

I have to say that there’s nothing I didn’t enjoy about this class.  This is probably my favorite undergraduate and graduate class I’ve ever had to take.  The only suggestion that I would have is the second week, when we were working on our lesson plans, I would start class by going over the next project with Excel and then give time to work on the Word project.  I say this because some people who are already teachers have lessons with all the criteria included already so they had to sit around for an hour and wait for those who didn’t have a lesson to finish.  This is just a suggestion; there’s nothing I disliked about the course!