{PowerPoint}

Microsoft PowerPoint is a great program that can be used in a variety of ways at home, at work, or at school. However, people don't always utilize PowerPoint to their advantage, and their presentations can come off as being unprofessional, annoying, or disorganized. Here are five things that really bug me about poorly constructed PowerPoint:
1) Bad transistions: Sometimes people's transistions are ineffective. They can be distracting or they just don't make sense for the content. If you're doing a serious buisness presentation, you probably shouldn't include a windmill transistion or something really casual.
2) Lack of variety: Sometimes professors use the same slides for every single lecture, and I think that can get really old. There are so many fun things you can do with excel, so why do you intentionally make it so boring?
3) Too much information: Sometimes people can try and cram too much information onto one slide. Everything you know shouldn't be on a slide. Slides are simply for talking points or for notes. You should expand on your slides using your presentation.
4) Obnoxious patterns/colors: Neon colored slides, really crazy fonts, or TONS of color can just be obnoxious and it really takes away from the content when my eyes are hurting from all your crazy accents.
5) No graphics: Use graphics in your PowerPoints! It helps us understand your points and brings an exciting visual aspect to the presentation!

PowerPoint can be used in a lot of great ways for buisness presentations, notes in class, and lectures. If people try to avoid those five things they will probably be better users of PowerPoint!

The Center for Learning & Technology

I enjoyed our visit today to the CLT center on the first floor of the library. I had been to CLT once before to scan newspaper articles for my potfolio when applying for a summer internship. CLT was helpful then and I'm confident will be even more helpful now that I know more about this place! Mr. Chapman gave us a great overview of everything the center is capable of. I appreciated his information about the people who work at the center and I took down a few of their names in case I need to ask any specialized questions about projects in the future. I also was happy to hear that a lot of the computers have programs like photoshop. This makes high-quality software accessible and practical for the college student and I'm excited to come down here on my own time and check out everything photoshop can do. I don't know very much about sound editing, but I also think I might look nto what the sound booths/audio editing stations are all about. The university's video conference technology also sounds awesome. It's cool they got to talk to The White House! I'm going to try working in the CLT lab for my communication classes where I'm required to do a lot of multi-media work. The Center for Learning & Technology is definitley an asset to Trinity and more students should take advantage of it!

Alterations.

I chose this picture for a variety of reasons. First, I felt that Harper's was a reliable source when compared to some of the other sources like The Enquirer. I was interested in analyzing a reliable source because I wanted to look somewhere unexpected. I wouldn't expect to see as many errors of fact in a respected source. The image used by Harper's was not taken by them, it was selected from a database in Getty Images. The picture wasn't really altered using photoshop, but it was taken out of context. I think that Harper's magazine did this either because they were lazy and didn't want to take a picture on their own, or they wanted to protect the identity of the soldiers. Either way, I don't think that the manipulation was harmful because I can't see any malicious or deceiving intent behind the image. I don't feel as if this image directly hurt anyone.

I chose the following video because I think it really showcases all that you can do with photoshop and just how much you can change an image to look like something it's not. I think that's also why the creator of this video did what they did. They wanted to show the viewer how photoshop can drastically change images.