Microsoft Power Point

Microsoft Power Point
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/

Microsoft Power Point was created by the Microsoft Company. It is apart of Microsoft Office along with Excel, Word, and One Note. It runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple's MAC OS X operating system. The newest version is for Windows is Microsoft Power Point 2010 and Microsoft Power Point 2011 for Macs. It can be used to create presentations and slide shows for projects/lectures on any subject someone might be interested in. Power Point is used from Middle School to High School and even in College to create presentations.

Main Feature
Power Point's main use is creating presentations either as part of a project or lecture. Teachers can use it to create lessons on any subject for their classes and students can use it for projects. Pictures, audio, videos, links, etc can all be included on the slides. It works like a slide show where a click of the mouse sends it to the next slide. Each slide can have a title and text. When its completed it can be anywhere from one slide to a thousand slides long.

Level of Difficulty
Power Point is not that difficult but it does take some getting used to. To fully understand how the program works would take a few hours of playing around with the different features or reading the manual. After initially learning how to use it, it is relatively easy to adapt to any situation that a student or teacher might need it for.

Potential Application
In the classroom it can be used by teachers along with lectures to instruct students. Power point can show images or have bulleted important facts. Most of us have seen Power Point somewhere in our academic careers. Teachers can create a lesson on any topic in any content area. They can be created for single day lessons or multi day lessons.

Conclusion
This tool is absolutely worth learning. It has changed the classroom allowing for teachers to upload lessons and slide shows to make lectures more complete. Handouts can also be printed out so students have a copy of the notes. Power Point can be used for any kind of presentation in all kinds of work fields.

Example:

Discovery Education

Tool Title: Discovery Education

Main Features: Discovery Education is a service of The Discovery Channel. It offers digit resources for teachers. This includes streaming educational videos in all subject areas, interactive textbooks, quiz generators, and sample lesson plans. There are also frequent webinars on topics related to teaching and using the website to enhance your class experience. It also has an exhaustive list of links to other resources available, sorted by subject.

Level of Difficulty: The website is fairly easy to use. It also has guided sections split into 3 levels, beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Each one explains different ways to use the site so that teachers can get the most out of it based on their level.

Application in the Classroom: This tool is meant to used for curriculum enhancement, to make your classroom more dynamic. By mixing in videos, primary documents, and interactive texts, you can make your lessons more engaging for your students. It also allows some student access from home, so that part of their homework can be on the site.

Conclusion: I think the tool is worth learning. It actually took very little learning for me. Things are set up in a way that make sense to average computer savy users, and there are lots of written guides to help along the way. The only downside is that only some of the materials are available without a user name and password, which are only given out through school districts. You need to work for a school or know someone who does to access the full site.

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is no-free commercial spreadsheet designed by Microsoft, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Excel along with PowerPoint, Word, and One Note form Microsoft Office. Using excel users can enter, edit and format data. They can create charts, diagrams, share their data and even solve mathematical functions. High school students are frequently asked to collect data and analyze it, especially in chemistry, physics and math. It can also be used for simple recording tasks. Excel provides a simple way to do this.

Graphing is taught throughout the academic curriculum and excel should not be used to eliminate the knowledge of how to make a graph, yet, once the students understand this, graphing becomes redundant. Excel is not hard to use, and can be used by people with moderate computer proficiency.  Moderate computer proficiency only in the sense that, tasks may require some addition research to learn how to use. For example, solving addition of data from different cells, one must type the function. (=STDEV(1,2). The new version has made it even easier to navigate with its new organization design. For example the tab labeled, insert has boxes inside, tables, illustrations, charts, links, and text.  If it is unclear how to perform a task in excel, the excel websites has “training videos” explaining exactly how do certain tasks. (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/excel-skills-builderlearn-how-to-create-spreadsheets-and-workbooks-use-formulas-and-perform-data-analysis-FX102592909.aspx)

This could be used in the classroom to show trends or relationships in the data that they have collected in classroom experiments. Solubility curves can be constructed for a mixture of methanol and cyclohexane by graphing the change in temperature vs. percent composition of the mixture. The curve can then be analyzed for conclusions. More simply students can use Excel to form a spreadsheet of data to keep track of who paid for prom tickets. Teachers can use it for simple tasks such as recording grades, and calculating averages instantly. As a chemist, I can honestly say I have used Excel to help formulate conclusions and analyze data for more than 90% of my labs. The graphs can provide a trend line with the corresponding equations and the R² values. It is extremely useful and I stress that Excels functions should be learned. It’s also worth learning because you can access your documents through Excels web applications. There is no need to deal with emailing files or remember your flash drive.

Greasemonkey Add-on for Firefox

Greasemonkey is an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that can help its users get more out of their online experience and the websites that they frequent. This add-on, in conjunction with user scripts, can alter websites to better suit your needs. I use this tool solely for printing pages from Google Books, but it can be used for much more. This online tool is accessible to anyone with the Mozilla Firefox or Opera web browsers.

Main Feature:
Greasemonkey's main use is altering websites and creating new functions that are helpful and convenient. One of its more popular user scripts is "Google Book Downloader" which allows the user to download and later print individual pages from Google books. This comes in extremely handy for college students that need to do research on little to no budget. Another popular user script, "GoogleMonkeyR," alters your Google search results but blocking the text ads, and displaying your results in columns so that you use more screen space and have to do less scrolling/searching.

Level of Difficulty:
Greasemonkey is very easy to use and simple to learn. Since Greasemonkey is a programming tool, people often fear that it will be difficult to use, but it is very user friendly. You can also go to online forums and learn more about Greasemonkey, and its uses outside of Google Books.

Potential Application:
Being a college student, I spend quite a deal of time on the internet researching various topics for my courses. This tool allows me to find more sources (with Google Books Downloader and other translation scripts) and sift through online searches faster. This ultimately saves me time and effort when doing school work and it could help many other students do the same.

Conclusion:
This tool is really a no-brainer for any and all students out there willing to give it a try. It will save you the headaches of looking at a computer screen for long hours while doing research or open up completely new features to websites you frequent often.

Quickbooks.com

Intuit Quickbooks Pro








Quickbooks Pro is a small business accounting and financial software. I have used this software for the past 15 years to manage all of the accounting for our mechanical contracting business. While I have the software installed on my home PC, using the product online is also an option. The online version offers the flexibility of working anywhere, anytime.

Main Features:
Quickbooks software allows users to easily create invoices and track sales and expenses, get reliable records for tax time, manage customer, vendor and employee data, process payroll and taxes, process credit card charges, create various company reports and securely download bank and credit transactions directly.


Level of Difficulty:
Quickbooks is very easy to set up and is relatively easy to learn. The online version offers the option of "chatting" with customer service representatives to address any questions.


Potential Application:
I think this could be a very useful tool to teach students about finance and accounting. Students can learn how to manage and understand the financial aspects of operating a business. Also, many teachers I know have small businesses in addition to their teaching careers. This software can enable them to quickly and efficiently manage the accounting and bookkeeping responsibilities that come with owning a business. For example, prior to using Quickbooks, I processed employee payroll manually. What used to take hours now takes minutes!


Conclusion:
This tool is definitely worth learning for anyone who is interested in operating a small business or anyone who teaches finance or accounting. Even the smallest business can benefit from having all of their financial records organized in one place and handling their business accounting using a computer instead of pencil and paper!

EasyBib.Com

http://EasyBib.Com

This webtool allows for relatively easy citation of sources and building of a works cited page. Recent updates have enabled the site to “find your source” based on keywords entered by you.

This is a fairly accessible and user friendly tool for all. When incorporated into my research projects, almost all of my students used the program with ease. Users generally “click” and “type” necessary information for each source, most of the time, the source is automatically found based on a few key words. Best of all, it works!

For the Middle and High school level this tool can be most effective when combing multiples sources for an extensive research assignment. I have used this with my 9th-11th graders and many found it to be very helpful. However, with this site if you don’t put in the right information, you will often get a wrong citation.

Another problem I found is that students often don’t know exactly where a source came from, being a journal a newsarticle etc. If they don’t know which source it is, there can be confusion as to how to cite it. Since the last time I used it I have noticed that the website has tool has tried to correct the problem by having a “search for your source” button.

This tool can be effective, as mentioned, for large research products where students are burdened with a long list of a variety of sources.The site helps you cite and create a works cited page (in fact it does so automatically). When I initially brought this into my classroom it was the best free external citation tool available. Unfortunately, in recent months the site took away all free citations except for MLA format, which is helpful in the younger grades, but most colleges want APA style. Surprisingly, the cite is also no longer “entirely free” but urges students to “upgrade” to do more (get additional help or APA). This I could see as a potential problem with students who think that they “must pay” in order to use it. Not to say, it isn't still efficient and useful, because it cited a source for me (for this project) faster than I could have looked it up.

What I feared about using a tool like this as a teacher is we are giving students a way to accomplish something, but not teaching them how to. Therefore, we must still be teaching “how to cite sources” and equip our students with skills to do this on their own, allowing the program to be just that, a tool. Lastly, students must be taught to “check their work.” Just because the tool did the citation, does not necessarily mean it is 100% correct. Therefore, students must understand that tools don’t replace skills, they only aid them.

mint.com

https://www.mint.com/

Right of the bat we can see the https, this will in fact be a secure website so do not be too afraid to use the website. Mint.com allows people to easily keep track of their finances on a website that combines all of your bank accounts into one. After signing up on the website you are able to take your bank account log-in information and add your multiple accounts here. Mint recognizes certain expenses and groups them based on factors such as leisurely expenses, bills, etc. There is a huge amount of user customization on this website and you can even set financial goals and weekly allowances for certain types of expenses that you can keep track of. The difficulty of mint is indicative of the types of features one wishes to use. The more basic features are by association going to be easier to use, it has a wide variety of tools and therefore a wide variety of skill can be used. However, I would not say mint.com needs someone proficient with a computer to use.

As far as classroom use is concerned, mint.com is essentially for balancing checkbooks. The math involved in mint.com is all done by the computer system itself. Instead, it should be used as a tool for teaching students to be financially smart about their money. Through the different tools on the website, you can see how a checkbook is balanced, how to set monthly goals of saving money and spending money. One can even go as far as looking at stock prices on mint.com and going along that route for learning how stocks work with your own finances. I personally remember classes in my high school that analyzed stock prices, money management, etc.

This is definitely a tool worth learning because it is for all proficiency levels and is a very useful tool. Since I started using mint.com I have not gone back at all, I don't even log into my separate bank websites anymore because mint.com does everything my banks do but collectively.