This last week, your young scholars worked on formatting characters, words and blocks of text within a document. They also learned how to make lists with bullet points, numbered lists and multi-tiered lists. A fun task they took on was to create their own bullet point graphics. They also learned to set tab stops eliminating tab keystrokes and still have nicely lined columns.
This coming week, students are going to learn more about and execute formatting document properties including but not limited to working with document formatting; changing paper size, orientation, and margins; inserting page and section breaks; work with columns of text; insert page numbers, insert headers and footers; apply themes or change backgrounds. To completely wrap up this week, students will need to update their Create project. I will update the requirements for the create project on Wednesday. I highly encourage you to ask your young scholar to see their Create project. This is not only a portfolio project where they are learning to use the lessons they learned in “real life”, but also how to be good digital citizens and protect themselves online. As we are mid-quarter, parents, I encourage you to look at your students grades with them. Focus especially on the progress, behavior and create needs. Parents, not only am I teaching your children the requirements to earn a professional certification but also professional courtesy, behavior and project requirements. As you know, in the professional world, deadlines are commonplace. They are expectations of an employer that a staff member can be relied upon to meet objectives and execute their assigned duties. If your student has missed deadlines, they have a participation or create score that reflects their level of contribution or (in)ability to meet a deadline. I ask you to emphasize the importance of meeting deadlines and encourage them to do so. Another aspect is proper behavior. Usually, when disciplinary action is required, it comes in the form of verbal warning, written warning, final notice and then, many times, termination. In my class, each student begins the week with 10 behavior points. If I have to address behavior(s), they get the symbolic warnings and notices. Then I begin to take points away. If your student has less than 10 points, in any behavior category, I encourage you to speak to them and solicit their response as to why they lost points and went beyond “final notice”. I ask you to encourage them to pursue full marks in behavior. Again, as we are mid-quarter, students have an opportunity to maintain positive performance and an opportunity to change to a positive performance if needed. I appreciate your continued support of our students and the training they are undertaking in my class. Have a wonderful weekend and see you on Monday. Please feel free to email me should you have any questions.
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Hello Titan Students and Parents,
Today is a “Great Day to Have a Great Day.” I want you to know how hard your students worked this week learning how to manipulate documents and streamline tasks. On Tuesday, students learned how to insert special characters like Registered®, Copyright© and Trademark™ using keyboard shortcuts and by using the insert tab and navigating to the symbols and characters menus. Finally, they learned about the undo and redo buttons. Undo tends to be a favorite 😉. Wednesday, students learned how to navigate throughout documents using a variety of methods including read mode, print mode, web mode and viewing documents through a split screen. They also learned how to change zoom levels and display multiple pages on the screen. Once completed we moved on to learning how to select text. This was accomplished by using the left click on a track pad or mouse and in combination with the CTRL and Shift keys. They also learned that a double click on a word would select that word and a triple-click would select the whole paragraph. All of these lessons help to improve the efficiency of tasks that students are charged to complete. Keeping that in mind, on Thursday, students learned to navigate through documents and search for key words, paragraph marks or special symbols. They also learned to find and replace text within a document sometimes replacing one instance, sometimes replacing all instances. Lastly, they learned to find a piece or pieces of text and replace that text with the same words but with new formatting which could include a different font type, size, color or styling. This coming week we will begin to learn a lot more about styling including but not exclusive to the format characters within the document like drop caps, tab stops, indent first line and similar formatting themes. We will also work on changing line spacing including lines, pica's and points before and/or after a line of text. We will also learn how to use the format painter. Another experience we will undertake is using the styles menu and making custom styles. Lastly, we will learn how to organize lists with bullet points, numbered lists and students will get to learn how to customize bullet point graphics. To completely wrap up this week, students will need to update their Create project. This week we will support this week’s lessons, by adding special characters to their paper; identifying social media organizations within their documents as Registered, Trademarked or Copyrighted or a combination of these. They will also have to search for those organizations and replace all instances with a bold, italicized and 12 point font. This is due by 8 A.M. Monday. I highly encourage you to ask your young scholar to see their Create project. This is not only a portfolio project where they are learning to use the lessons they learned in “real life”, but also how to be good digital citizens and protect themselves online. Please feel free to email me should you have any questions. Have a wonderful weekend and see you on Monday. Good afternoon Plato students and parents,
We survived and thrived in another week of learning and interacting within our new learning environments. We have settled nicely into a routine of quiz, lessons, post quiz and writing project. I am happy to let you parents and guardians know just how proud I am of your young scholars this week. They have learned to open, close, save and save-as documents. We have used a variety of keyboard shortcuts, quick access tools and our file menu as well. The students have also learned about the document backstage, information panel, properties and advanced properties. They also experienced a key exam step of importing text from file. Finally students got to learn about and experience rich text formatting (.rtf) and portable document format (.pdf) files. All students should have 9% progress and thus a 100% for their weekly progress grade. I encourage you to have your student log into the lab and show you their progress. As a reminder, to access the lab computers they need to go to https://remote.platoacademy.net Then they will use the username and password they set up in class. It is in my humble opinion that the most valuable lesson they learned this week was the importance of following the written directions. Even though there are multiple ways to achieve the tasks required, our software is very specific and counts for all steps. For example, it measures and grades capitalization, punctuation and specifics such as using “delete” vs. “backspace”. While this may seem to be petty, the bigger lesson is that students are learning attention to detail. As future applicants and potential employees, they won’t have to tell a prospective employer that they are detail oriented or that they “pay attention to details.” Those students that earn and put on their resumes “MOS” or “Microsoft Office Specialist” certifications will have already told that story. Employers know the rigors of this program and what it takes to earn this certification. As in other subjects, learning is only half of the challenge. The other component is applying what they have learned. So students are beginning their “Create” or portfolio project. Again, I encourage you to ask them what this project is all about. This week, they will be writing their four paragraphs about an important subject (online safety). They will be adding properties such as subject, title, author and keywords. As well, they will save the document as a Word .docx format and .pdf format. They will earn an extra point for saving additionally as a .rtf file. As this is a holiday weekend, I will be taking a break Saturday and Sunday to continue unpacking our home but I will occasionally check email and on Monday will check it more frequently for any questions that you young scholars or parents and guardians may have. I wish everyone a relaxing weekend and fun, safe holiday. I look forward to seeing everyone back in class on Tuesday and ready to learn again. By the way, should any student require or request one-on-one tutoring via google meet, I am happy to oblige. Just please allow me some advance warning so that I may arrange my schedule and I will get a calendar invite created. This may include weekends if needed. Thanks again class(es). Job well done, |
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