End of the road

    As everyone wraps up on different projects during class, you finalize everything on your end and with a sigh of relief you logout for the final time of the semester. All the countless hours put in, has earned you a MOS certificate.

    Certainly a challenging course and different from what I'm used to. There were moments where I felt like I wanted to give up, but I of course knew better not to.

    As students reflect on what they've learned during the semester, I wonder if Professor Wu ask's the same question himself after each semester. "What have I learned from my students and what can I change to make this course even better for future students”.

Visual Learning

    We all learn differently, some are fine reading everything out of a book, but some can't learn at all without visually seeing things and being hands on. An image or video gives us a clear understanding on topics, not only that, but it helps capture our attention.

    With media formatting in PowerPoint, you can insert photos, videos and audio. These can make you presentation fun and interesting, making it more effective when showing your audience your point instead of just telling them.

    There are many ways to customize your media as well. You can incorporate styles and effects, crop, align, etc. The floor is yours! Be sure to make things eligible though. Just because it may look neat and fancy doesn't mean it'll be easy to read when presented through a projector in a big room full of an audience who can be far back in the room.

Deleting & Clearing

    Reading this chapter made me think of MOUT (Military operations on urbanized terrain). I thought, deleting the enemy & clearing the room. What a perfect topic to choose, I said. When entering a building you want to delete any bad guys and clear the building for any remaining threat.

    This relates to Excel because sometimes you want to remove information from spreadsheets. You can delete cells or cell contents. Another option for removing data is clear, which is found on the home tab which will clear contents but leave the cells and their formatting.

    From crayon eating grunts to cubicle hunchback desk-job workers, deleting and clearing anything applies to many aspects of our lives. While I may not be a fan of the second one, I sure do miss the first one... sometimes.

Technology Has Made You Illiterate

    As you text your friend you try to spell the word "synonyms" but instead of typing it correctly you spell cinnamon's. Autocorrect doesn't pick up on this because you spelled cinnamon correctly but now your sentence doesn't make sense. Although it might sound similar you're comfortability has made you lazy and hoped that autocorrect will do its thing. As sweat runs profusely from your armpits you freeze in fear and google how to spell it. 

    AutoCorrect is a tool to that catches most common typing errors, it comes in handy and is used on many platforms. You'll realize you made a typing error usually when the word is underlined in red, if not the program will most often correct it automatically for you.

    Point of the blog is, learn to spell. If you're the type of person to do what I exampled in the first paragraph, then maybe you have to go back to fifth grade, or just have technology as your crutch.

Restricting Access

    Our government restricts tons of information to the public, mostly being for security reasons. This is also creates lots of conspiracy theories which can lead to misinformation! My favorite conspiracy is 9/11 and the JFK assassination. The CIA is known to not be the most trustworthy three letter agency. Maybe this blog would put me on there watch list, who knows? The reason I picked this topic is because secrecy always intrigued me.

    There are many reason for restricting documents, the main reason would be to prevent someone from accidentally publishing before polishing a document. This could spread misinformation to customers and stakeholders. When many people have access to the document to edit, mistakes can happen. Microsoft has built in tools to prevent this from happening. When restricting access, you can choose who you want to add and grant permission to either read or edit the document. You'll be able to add a password to heighten security also. This type of practice is used in many other fields as well, not just Microsoft.

Common Operating Systems Today

    The most common operating systems used today are Windows, Apple OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android. These systems are integrated in our everyday tech devices such as computers and phones, they provide a platform for applications to run on and many other features.

    Growing up I've always been familiar with Windows and Apple. I remember as an elementary student there were Apple computers in our class and at home my father had a Windows computer, so I got a taste of both worlds. It wasn't until my teenage years till I was introduced to iOS around 2011 which caused a shift in how we operate our phones because of how innovative it was at the time.

    In conclusion, companies for the most part pull ideas from each other all the time so none of these operating systems are complicated to use if you only used one of them your entire life, they're very similar in some ways.

The Gamer

     It's 2009 and you turn on your Xbox360. You launch Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, playing for hours staring at your TV. You find yourself in a situation where you die four times in a row and out of rage throw your controller at the TV. You see a black streak, you've essentially destroyed the monitor and ruined the RGB display. The monitor is made up of tiny red, green and blue lights that make up what we see on the big screen which is what I've learned about it chapter 1. As a curious kid who did dumb things like put his eyeball up to a TV, I've always wondered what those tiny colors were.

Staying vigilant

    As kids we are all easily influenced by what we see. Growing up in Philadelphia seeing crime was normal, till I realized as I got older my environment wasn't the same every else. Many areas in our nation have a high crime rate.  Danger can come within seconds when not looking, so staying aware of your surroundings and staying safe should always be a priority. I spent 6 months in Japan and looking back on it, I remember always feeling relatively safe and common courtesy is huge there. So it really gave me a glimpse of another society outside of America. I could let my guard down in Japan but would I do the same in Philadelphia at night? Probably not. That's why it's important to be aware of your surroundings and act accordingly.