Summer Training - 2006
Assumption College

Blackboard is great for classroom work but not for sharing your professional accomplishments with colleagues and prospective students.

Come learn how to get a web site started using Dreamweaver (web site editor as easy to use as a word processor). You’ll learn how to build a useful, as well as professional, web site quickly. You’ll be able to build your own site from scratch or choose from a template that only needs your content added such as your C.V. and/or photos.

This is a 2 day seminar. The first day will be spent getting you up and running with Dreamweaver and the second day will be spent getting you up to speed with Photoshop (image editing software).

These seminars are always fun and they move at a good pace to keep you from going cross-eyed! 

This 2 day hands-on seminar is for anyone that needs/wants a web site, or maybe you just need a refresher.

This workshop covers the basics of setting up a course site with Blackboard. Participants will have the opportunity to create a basic course site and discuss the pedagogical implications of using a course management system in their courses.

Enrollment limit: 6

This workshop covers the basics of creating quizzes and surveys in Blackboard. Participants will have the opportunity to create a basic quiz or survey and discuss the issues surrounding online assessment.

Enrollment limit: 6

In this workshop participants will learn how to create gradebook items and enter grades. This workshop also discusses how certain Blackboard items, such as quizzes and assignments, can automatically generate gradebook items, and how to access those items. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss how best to use the gradebook with their students.

Enrollment limit: 6

This workshop covers the basics of developing learning units for online delivery. A model for the development of learning units will be presented that can be used in conjunction with Learning Unit feature of Blackboard. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss the pedagogical value of learning units in their courses both online and Blackboard supplemented.

Enrollment limit: 6

Learn how to use the groups and chat features of Blackboard. This workshop will focus on how to set-up groups and how the chat functions work. Participants will also discuss how to best integrate these features into their courses.

Enrollment limit: 6

This course covers the skills necessary to use Microsoft Word efficiently and independently. Topics covered will include how to set up your document, moving and editing text with cut, copy, & paste; formatting text, working with paragraphs, bullets & numbering, and creating columns; Mastering styles and managing long documents ; Using various tools and inserting tables

Create a new document based on a template and apply styles. Create and modify a style

apply a style to text in a document. Manage the use of styles. Use the AutoText, AutoComplete, AutoCorrect and AutoFormat features. Use sections to correctly format your documents. Create endnotes and footnotes. Add headers and footers and change them for each section

This workshop introduces the skills necessary to create a PowerPoint presentation. We will create a presentation in the class using standard design methods. The workshop will show one how to alter an existing design template using the Slide Master and the Title Master, altering backgrounds, textures, colors, and text. We will create slides, selecting from the Slide Layout dialog box, and use the various views of the PowerPoint interface to modify and rearrange slides in the presentation. Inserting graphics, sounds, word art and setting up animations and slide transitions are discussed briefly. Lastly, we will learn about the different aspects of running a presentation.

Day 1: This class is designed for the beginner Excel user. Learn how to enter data and navigate within a worksheet, modify a worksheet, use basic formulas, move and copy data, format a worksheet and print a worksheet. Excel's formulas and functions provide powerful spreadsheet capabilities. You will build start with basic and then do some more complex formulas. You will learn how to use common functions such as Sum, Average, Maximum, Minimum and Count, and more complex functions such as IF statements, PROPER, DATE and PMT functions.

Day 2 Learn how excel keeps track of information in lists or databases.  You will create a list, use the data form to add, find, edit and delete records.  Sort a list, use the autofilter to filter a list as well as create an advanced filter. Use the data validation when entering records into a list. You will learn how to extract First, Middle and Last names from a single cell, how to remove titles from a cell, how to capitalize the first letter of every word within a cell, and how to use Conditional Formatting.

Session 1: Quick review of spreadsheet; dynamic features; multiple sheets; sums; formulas; relative vs. absolute references; copying formulas; not copying formulas; range names. Functions – math, logic, lookup, text, information; getting ranges/data from a different sheet; getting ranges/data from a different workbook.

Session 2: Charts (graphs) - appropriateness; kinds; formatting; manual scales; editing labels, titles, etc.; legends; use of color and patterns; readability. Reports – formatting; split screen; freeze; title rows; page-break view. Special functions – financial, array, IF.

Now that the campus has all been converted to our Exchange system using Outlook/Entourage for email and calendaring, we wanted to address specific common questions and ideas about using Exchange tools to improve your work life. The following areas will be covered.

1. Email and Organization and Maintenance

a. Folders – server & personal; archiving email / autoArchive; mailbox cleanup
b. Flag for follow up
c. Rules Wizard
d. Microsoft Organization: Add color to your email; Using folders: Using views; Junk email

2. Calendar and Tasks

a. Viewing department calendars; creating appointments for others; meeting requests for nyone on the campus; Show time as---
b. Assigning Tasks – marking % complete; checking

3. Contacts and Notes

This is your chance to bring up all those little problems that annoy you and you don’t remember to ask. Save up your questions and try to stump Carmella, Mimi and Dr. Brown with any and all of your Microsoft problems.

Photoshop is the best program to adjust any picture. This seminar will cover what everyone should do to enhance any digital picture (from the web, from a scanner, from a digital camera).

On this day we will dedicate the first section to basics of digital camera use (quality, focusing, previewing and deleting). Then, the class will go out and take pictures which will be used in the intermediate Pictures seminar the following 2 days.

This seminar will take some of the pictures from digital cameras and others to manipulate the images by using filters, layers, masks and channels. You will learn color correction strategy and practice a variety of color correction techniques.

Come learn how to get a web site started using Dreamweaver (web site editor as easy to use as a word processor). You’ll learn how to build a useful, as well as professional, web site quickly. You’ll be able to build your own site from scratch or choose from a template that only needs your content added such as your C.V. and/or photos.

This is a 2 day seminar. The first day will be spent getting you up and running with Dreamweaver and the second day will be spent getting you up to speed with Photoshop (image editing software).

What is RSS?

If you do an online search for "RSS" you will find that this acronym means different things based on the author. At Assumption College the intended definition for RSS is "Real Simple Syndication." This technology has been taking off more than ever in the past year although it was first developed in 2000.

So what is it and why is it terrific?!? The traditional way of finding out if your favorite news Web sites have been updated is to bookmark those sites and visit them daily. However, when you visit Web sites you must scan the pages to see if there is anything of interest to you.When you find something interesting, you click on that article in order to read it. This process can take time but RSS saves you both time and effort by doing the work for you. In order to benefit from RSS you must first install an RSS reader (aggregator) on your computer.

RSS is an aggregator of Web site feeds. Some larger sites have news broken down into categories such as local, national, international, sports, entertainment, etc. On those sites you can subscribe to the types of news that most interest you.

How does it work? Once you have the RSS reader software installed on your computer (either as a stand-alone software desktop program or as part of your web browser) it constantly monitors all of the sites that you are interested in. As those sites are updated with new stories the RSS reader will let you know and give you the title of the story along with a brief description (the length of the description varies from site to site). If you're interested in the story you can then choose to read the entire story by clicking on a link.

In a way it's like creating your own personal newspaper that is FREE and comes to you as news stories happen! You can subscribe to feeds related to national and international news, business, technology, weather, sports, or your favorite hobby!

Come learn how to very quickly and easily set up an RSS reader on your computer
Both Windows and Macintosh platforms will be covered.  While there are many readers for each kind of computer we’ll be sticking to one or two software programs only.

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