Week 4 Roadmap

1. Read all your classmates' discussion posts about chapter 3.
2. Read chapters 4, 5, and 6.
3. Visit cbt.memphis.edu and complete the Excel tutorials.
4. Read the articles about wikis.
5. Add something to our course wiki.

Fun

How about a quick game of 20 Questions?

And this just in from "News of the Weird": You've heard of the iPod. Well here's the Die-Pod.

Read

chapters 4, 5, and 6 from our textbook.

Software tutorials

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet. You will read about this kind of software in chapter six, so read chapter six before continuing. The next two assignments you will complete involve using a spreadsheet.

The university of Memphis offers free access to some really nice tutorials on using software. These tutorials can be found at cbt.memphis.edu. Visit this site and search for "excel". There you will find several courses with "excel" in the title. Take the following tutorial courses, in the order below. This will take several hours.

Beginning Excel

1. Excel 2003: Working with Existing Workbooks
2. Excel 2003: Formatting Excel
3. Excel 2003: Writing Formulas

Intermediate Excel

1. Excel 2003: Analyzing and Managing Data
2. Excel 2003: Manipulating Workbooks

If you know how to use Excel (or any other spreadsheet), you may only need to skim through these courses.

Wikis

A wiki is server software that results in a web site composed of linked pages that anyone can edit. First, read "What's a Wiki", from extremetech.com.

Read this article by Brian Lamb, "Wide Open Spaces: Wikis, Ready or Not " in Educause Review.

Now, go to our class wiki and post something. Anything class-related. Add your name at the end of your post. I added a few headings to give you some ideas of what to add. How about a spreadsheet tutorial, or a collection of lessons incorporating spreadsheets?

To post something

1. go to the wiki page you want to edit
2. click "edit page"
3. type in what you want
4. click "save" at the bottom of the page

My sister is a graphic design and writer, and I design learning environments, so we got the design gene from somewhere. My mom was a kindergarten teacher for 15 years, so I grew up with a teacher-mom, which was great. Now she's an insurance agent, which means she's still very involved in people's lives, but her salary structure has changed significantly. She also gets to be her own boss, which she enjoys. She says teaching was much less bureaucratic and more fun in the 1970s. The teacher could have fun with the kindergartners, and there was less pressure on kindergartners than there is now.

Today we interviewed three new doctoral students for our program. If you'd like to know more about my field, visit my program's website. We update it quite regularly with news on the front page. If you'd like to get an occasional email from us, we send out job announcements, scholarship information, and other IDT news. Subscribe to our newsletter by entering your email address near the bottom right of the page.

I'll be grading your concept mapping assignments this week, and will post the grades in WebCT. Have a great week!

Dr. M.