U-Blog 5

This week my group did our workshop at the Heritage. We did our project on OpenOffice Writer. That application is free and it's also very similar to Microsoft Word. I thought we had a great group and did a pretty good job with the presentation. For our powerpoint, we tried to lay everything out as simply as possible. We had step by step directions for the assignments we gave the students to work on. We began by going over the basics of Writer and telling some things it can be used for. We then took screen shots of each step for their assignment. First, we took a screenshot showing how to open writer by double clicking the icon, or by using the start menu and finding writer through there. Once they had Writer open, we had them write at least one paragraph about how they felt about using a computer now that they had been through several workshops. This was pretty much the bulk of the class time. We also had steps going through how to save the document, reopen the document, as well as editing the document by chaning the font, font size, and also making something bold, italic or underlined. We planned to have them go through each step one by one but that really didn't seem to happen. Some students were actually able to get through the entire thing very early, and some were behind. We found it very hard to get their attention again to go over the next step once they began to use the computer. My advice to any future teams, make sure you say everything you need to before you let them begin their assignment. Over all the class did very well and I was very pleased with our workshop.

U-Blog 4

These past few weeks have been very busy. We were assigned groups for the various workshops we'll be presenting after spring break. We were given quite a few group assignments involving our workshop team and a different group for the wikipage assignment we have to do. For the most part the workshop assignments have had the same type of format. First discuss a topic within our own team discussion board, elect a leader, and have that leader post a summary of the team discussion on the main board. The discussion topics for those assignments have been, Workshop Topics and IT's top five training mistakes. For the most part, our team did a pretty good job of having everyone participate and quickly electing a leader to post the summary. I feel like I have a very dependable team and look foward to finishing this workshop with them.
To make any group project successful you really need to have everyone play their part. I see no problems with someone not playing their part within our group. I've had some pretty terrible groups throughout the years so I'm glad to finally get in a good one. We're scheduled to meet during tomorrows class to work on finishing up our draft for the presentation part of the project. Our group will be presenting on OpenOffice. We had originally planned on doing Word, but the computers in the lab at the Heritage only has OpenOffice. We're scheduled to present on March 23rd. I believe we're the third group to go. I'm glad we're presenting earlier. I'd much rather get it out of the way.