Post #2

As a kid I used to spend hours on MS Word, writing creative stories and comedic routines. In school I have used MS Word primarily as a tool to write and edit papers. Recently, I started to re-type my handwritten notes into Word to organize the information more clearly and to re-visit the information I quickly scrawled in class. My teachers seem to keep the use of Word to the obvious applications: writing up handouts, study guides, and tests.

However, I once had a teacher who broke the mold and used Word in a more creative way. She used the table and text art features to design bingo cards for her classes. The idea was to turn that weeks vocabulary into a bingo game to be played in class. She would write the vocabulary terms in the rows and columns of the table and read the definitions of the words she called out. It was up to the individual student to know the definitions and match it to the word on our card. This was an easy way to incorporate the use of Word in the class room in a fun way that was applicable to what we were studying.

The skills this class have taught me so far that I see as being useful are: formatting tests, use of the print screen button, and shortcuts I wasn't aware of before. Tools such as page break will be useful for formatting tests I administer. I can see the knowledge of the print screen button coming into use should I need to make a tutorial to show my students how to navigate around/operate a computer. I can copy the images of screens they need to see, paste (Ctrl + V) them to a program such as paint, and save them. Then I can use a program such as Movie Maker to create a tutorial, using the saved images. It will be a presentation I can show to the class or post to a class website where they can view and get help outside of class. Other shortcuts I've learned are little things here and there, such as how to increase and decrease the size of the paint brush in the Paint program, beyond the options that are available to click on. Also, the actual ability of creating a short cut to programs I may need to readily access.