Journal Topics for Computer Apps class

One of the tasks you will need to complete this semester is to insert a number of journal posts to your blog. We will divide the topics for your journal entrys up to include a number of main types of personal writing. We will include journaling about: personal revelations, clarifying thoughts or positions, relationships, and topics involving speculation and different perspectives. You will need to write (1) blog post for each major category over the course of the semester.

Assessment: We will use the Student Journal Writing Assessment Rubric to assess the quality of your journal writing. You will need to keep a copy of this in your three-ring binder.

Importing a Google Map into Blogger

It is pretty easy upload and put a Google Maps map into your blog. This is something students in Computer Apps will be doing for the fourth quarter. It's pretty easy to embed a post into your blog directly from Google Maps. You can also share your map just like you can share your documents in Google Docs.


View Fair Haven Union High School in a larger map

This is a map of FHUHS with polygons made to represent the parking lots.

Business Letter Link and Picture

Students did a nice job this week linking to their business letter in Google Docs, sharing it with their teacher and then embedding it in their blog post as a picture file. We learned that simply linking the document to Google Docs from here often wasn't easy as the viewer or user was asked to sign into Goolge Docs to view the document.

(Click on the link above to view the document)

A work-around, we decided, was to link the document as a picture file (jpeg). We used Adobe Acrobat to change the document from Word to a pdf and then saved it as a picture. Students then uploaded the picture file to their blogs.

Add-Ons for Internet Explorer 8

Students in Mr. Connelly's Computer Apps class: Internet Explorer 8 has a number of new features and add-ons to make your blog and other writing easier and your research simpler. In order to make your writing easier, IE8 has added a task bar for your web favorites. It's called (no surprise!) the Favorites Task Bar and you can use it to store a number of favorite sites with even easier access than saving your pages to your Favorites List. Click on the Google page on the left to view the task bar - highlighted in red.

For the purposes of our class, we'll add some research links to our task bar:

Dictionary.com

Thesaurus.com

Wikipedia.com

Also include a link to your blog for easy access. After you've added these sites, go ahead and make a screen capture of your Google Page. The way to do this is to hold down the CTRL key and press the Print Screen Key on the upper right hand side of your keyboard.

When finished, import the screen capture as a picture into your blog like I've done here.

Mr. C's Imported Inspiration Map as GIF

Students in Mr. Connelly's Computer Apps class: Here is an example of an Inspiration Mind Map exported as a graphic file or .gif. After you export it, you can then add the image in your post as I did here.

For this class you will need to save your original Inspiration map on your "H" drive, print your map so you can put it in your three-ring binder and include it here in your blog post. Very cool!!