Meeting 9

Assignments

  1. Go here and edit your page, collecting all of your links to important class assignments (this page can also be reached from the 7061 main page under "Special Links")
  2. Post your lesson plan here (this page can also be reached from the 7061 main page under "Special Links")
  3. Everybody's research topic seems to be posted under Meeting 5 except for Sally, Tawana, and Charlie. Please post your topic on the Meeting 5 list if it is not there.

Class Notes

To start off the class, we went around the room and shared our progress on our special research project.

Next, we discussed rubrics:

How our rubrics for the word processing lesson plan compare to Dr. M's
How can we use Zoho Creator to make rubrics?

How do databases compare to spreadsheets?

Databases are more powerful, yet harder to use
Learning Management Systems such as eCourseware are essentially databases

Discussion of lesson plans

We shared our plans with our neighbor, then JJ, Robert and Brent shared with the class

We broke into groups and answered the Chapter 6 "getting started" questions

Authoring Tools (Recap)

  • Software to create software
  • Try to bridge gap between programmers and "SMEs" (Subject Matter Experts)
  • SMEs trying to save money by creating their own software
  • Authoring tools are not as effective as they could be
  • Robert talks HyperStudio
Clunky and awkward, not made with Internet in mind
Dropping in academic popularity due to free, user-friendly, open source alternatives (What is open source?)
  • Other tools: Dreamweaver for webpages
  • Flash for web animation
Difficult to learn
Expensive and "not that great"

Spreadsheets 101

  • Software: Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Zoho Spreadsheet, Google Docs, Apple Numbers
  • History in old accounting forms
  • Based on rows and columns, which intersect in cells
  • Cells can hold numbers, text, formulas
  • Rows are numbered from one to infinity down left side
  • Columns are lettered across top from A to infinity
  • "Diamond" button in upper-left corner selects entire spreadsheet
  • Cells will stretch for more info to fit
  • Sometimes better to put spreadsheet or database online so that one person does not have to collate many documents (currently Excel cannot do this, although "Microsoft Live" is on the way to solve this problem)
Take caution with confidentiality issues!
  • Cells can be formatted for alignment, font, decimal places, etc.
  • Formula bar tells what is in the cell (actual formula, not just result)
  • Equals sign at the beginning of a cell indicates a formula
  • Excel files referred to as workbooks
  • Each workbook can have multiple sheets (managed in lower-left corner)
  • Remember that the "save as webpage" option creates formatting issues

To close, we practiced with spreadsheets on our own for a few minutes

Specific questions about spreadsheets that you would like to ask: I thought this would be a good section to have on our wiki where other experts in the class could offer answers. (J.J. Hutton)