New things I learned and my family tree book

Wow! The new things I am learning in this class is great not only for my career as a teacher but also for my personal usage. The tux games we played are SOOOOOOOOOOO much better than the games I remember. Tux Typing beats Mavis Beacon; Tux Paint beats Paint; Tux Math beats math blaster! I remembered when Midnght Rescue was the in - thing in my school. Wow was it sure a great game on the old orange and black screens! Now you can do virtually anything on the computer in full color! Spreadsheets are a wonderful thing to have to record data for grading. I have used spreadsheets before and nothing has phased me because the equations for averages and the cells are very similiar. But, it was a great review to have!

I am still at doubts with technology because let's face it, it can screw up just like anything else! Back in high school, I was one to write a lot of stories, essays, and reports. I was not that smart to save every ten minutes and thus sometimes I would push a button and it deleted everything on me. There was no way of retrieving this at all, and thus I disliked technology. However, I am so happy to learn about the different things about Microsoft Office that I did not know about before. For resumes, letters, and cover letters, I will definitely think about using mail merge as a source of making things easier on me.

I think one of my greatest accomplishments while dealing with computers is my family tree book. Four years I worked on my family tree book while attending high school. Four long and grueling years (maybe that is a little dramatic); but, it was hard work and partially due to the fact I made it more complicated than I should have. I would of been done in 2 years; however, we just got a new scanner and thus I figured the family tree book would look awesome with pictures of my family in it. So, waiting for snail mail (ahhh one great thing about the internet is receiving pictures much faster than snail mail) took forever. Finally when I started scanning my pictures they were all sizes so I had to learn about cropping and making sure that I enlarged the pictures the same length and width so that some pictures didn't make the people look bigger than they should have. Thus, I was finished December 2004 and believed it was a success. Unfortunately, a family tree is never complete. So, with this said technology played a very important part because with receiving a hard copy of the book, I also included a cd rom with pictures and a disc (rtf format) so that when new information arises they can just add it to the book electronically.