Learning from Chris Nolan

Mr. Nolan’s presentation was very instructive and taught me a lot about useful tools for every day use of search engines. Important common sense information I was unaware of such as the fact that .com signals that it is a commercial site, .org represents non profit organizations, among others. I also found it very useful to learn that Google shows the popular sites in the initial pages, but scholarly journals and information that could be really helpful is in the pages further back. Something that surprised me from this informative lecture was the JC Penney case:

JC Penny contracted a company who created fake websites that linked to the JC Penney webpage so it was on an extremely high place in many search results. Google changed logarithms and took other measures to avoid this to happen and allow more honest search to occur.

This showed Google is valuable and in many ways tries to find the best results for its customers

Power Point Entry

Power point is one of Microsoft Office's greatest tools in my opinion. It helps to organize ideas into a single presentation which portrays them in an organized manner which is visually appealing to an audience. Furthermore, it contains so many small applications within to make the presentation interactive and interesting. Hyperlinks and transitions help the presentation be smooth and easy to use in order for the person giving the presentation to not distract others by taking out posters or other ineffective aids. Lately power point is used more and more throughout businesses and educational systems, one can even suggest that in many ways it is over used or incorrectly used.

Although power point is a fantastic tool, people tend to misinterpret the purpose of it and use it erroneously. Coming to college was very different to what I was used to in my school where power point was used by the students to give entertaining presentations to the class. At Trinity most professors use power point and it really is evident how they use it just to write down information instead of using all its tricks and tools to make the class better. One of the things they tend to do is write a lot of information in each bullet point which just makes it visually hard to see and it drags on the presentation longer. Another thing seen on an awful power point presentation is the lack of organization. Each slide layout is there to help each section and many times scattered ideas and data are found all over the presentation without considering that each sub topic can be narrowed down into one or a few organized slides. Using transitions helps and many times we see this application being neglected, when it takes only a few seconds to add them. Honestly as I learn more about power point I realize how easy it is to make a great presentation and how we could all benefit from it. I just hope to take advantage of this amazing tool once I learn more about its wonders!