I had my fourth visit with Sharon at Frick last Friday (November 2). It was a really good meeting. She wanted to work on a PowerPoint presentation, which made me nervous initially, as Power Point is not one of my strong points. However, I need not have been worried, as Sharon found her way around PowerPoint pretty well, much better than I thought she would. I helped her out with some formatting and presentation issues, but she more or less did it herself, which was encouraging to see. I think PowerPoint may be among the most user-friendly Office programs, though, since it’s used so extensively. And it turns out that Microsoft still has the edge as far as presentation software capability. While it sounds like the Google office software is good at just about everything that MS Office is, it still hasn’t cracked PowerPoint: http://www.slate.com/id/2176549/
I also wonder if my initial trepidation wasn’t influenced by my cumulative experience so far. What I mean by this is that I’ve become so accustomed to assuming that things are going to be complex and difficult to explain to a newer user, but there are times when things are really simple, and maybe I’ve forgotten that. I think the Digital Citizenship class, with all its hard questions about technology, has complicated IT in my mind, too, which is probably affecting my service-learning outlook.
Today I was supposed to teach some of the other teachers at Frick the things I’ve taught Sharon. However, Sharon emailed me earlier in the week and called it off. I’m glad she did, but now I’m wondering how I’m going to fit my hours in. I’ve only got 8 so far, and I need 20, which is a lot when you start to think about it. I’m hoping to squeeze in the teacher symposium, because that will give me a ton (Sharon was thinking I’d be at the school from 9 am to 3 pm). We’ll see.
P.S. The WordPress spell check doesn’t recognize “Google,” so maybe the company hasn’t conquered the entire Web yet.
