LAST WEEK!! ALL DONE!!

YEAH!! OK I am done doing the happy dance now! So on to answer the questions:

• Do you feel you now understand what we covered in this class? If so, what parts/tasks did you enjoy most? If not, what tasks were most difficult? I have really enjoyed this class as a whole, it has not been very difficult, because I have worked on computers for years now, even though most everything was self taught. I found Access REALLY difficult! I don't enjoy difficult things...:) So I did NOT like Access.

• Pretend for a moment that you have the opportunity to speak to the new BA131/CS120 class of students. What would you tell them to help them succeed in this class? I would tell a new student, read ALL the tabs before you start an assignment.

• And on a fun note...any cool plans for the holidays? Any cool ideas for presents?

We stay home for the holiday's, all of our family lives nearby. We are thinking of building a princess castle in the toy room for our girls. That would be our fun stuff for the holiday's!

Week 11

This week was really easy, I went over the study guide and knocked out the three projects. Those were pretty easy too, however I am wondering if I am doing a couple things right. It wants it in a percent format, I think, in the Excel worksheet, but then that changes my numbers and formulas. So I am just not sure.

We are suppose to comment on two other blogs, I have the hardest time finding someone who has completed their blog. Most of them seem to have dropped off quite a few weeks ago. I find myself commenting on the same people, because I know they will have theirs done! Thanks to those of you who post! :)

Let's see personal life, Oh I know our church is putting on a Creche' exhibit, it is so pretty! They set up hundreds of Nativities of all different kinds, and they have a live Nativity. So I have been helping with that this week.

Here is a link, if any of you live close enough, but I think I am the only one clear out in this neck of the woods! :)

http://mhcreche.org/

Week 10.....

HOLY COW!! I officially hate access...that was the most grueling 3 hours of school yet! OK but I am done with it now. I can get on with enjoying Thanksgiving.

As a whole I have enjoyed this class, I am signed up for my classes for next term, I am still really excited to be in school, but I know by summer I will be ready for a break.

I have been 'Black Friday' shopping online. So I will include a link to a fun site I found:

http://www.blackfriday.info/sales/

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!

WEEK 9

I am so looking forward to thanksgiving! I am having some of my family over, when we all gather there are about 30 or so, just with my siblings and their families and my parents. This year a couple of the siblings are going elsewhere, so it will only be about 15 people or so. Nice small family gathering!

My 10 year old and I (my daughter especially, she can hardly contain herself!) are so excited to go see the New Moon movie that is coming out Friday. I can post this on this blog because my Mom does not read it. We are going to surprise her and all go to it for her birthday. She thinks right now all her kids are too busy to go with her to it, and when you have 7 kids, that is kinda a sad story!

OK so onto schoolwork, this week was really easy, and fun! I worked all evening until about midnight on my game for Microsoft, I just got started and the time flew away from me. I really enjoyed making it, I could see making other presentations in Power Point. The only thing I have left for this class is the interviews, the hardest part is finding a day that I can dump my kids on someone, so I can go interview someone undisturbed! But all in all another successful week in the world of college as an adult (not a young adult!) I also got registered for my classes for the winter term, I really would like to take four but at this time I am signed up for three.

Week 8!!

Nearly done with this term! The PowerPoint quizzes kicked my TAIL! I am not sure how I did on the assignment, I guess I will wait and see. I am not sure why I did so awful on the quizzes, maybe I read the information too late at night. It was one A.M. by the time I finished all four skills reviews. Otherwise, this class has been pretty easy, just a few new things, I didn't know before. I am looking forward to next term, I am curious if all of my classes will be this easy, or if they will get harder as I progress? I expect they will.

So we had an ER visit this week, thankfully it turned out to be MINOR! My four year old was playing with a metal necklace, when she started crying, I was trying to figure out what happened when I saw blood coming out of her ear! I was terrified. I don't deal with my kids getting hurt well at ALL. The necklace is the kind that is a hard metal and goes around your neck without any clasp, so it snaps when you pull on it, I snapped it on my hand and it hurt, so somehow she snapped it in her ear, but thankfully she didn't damage her eardrum!

Week 7

It's week seven! I am I so excited its Wednesday night and I am DONE with school work! Wait I think its Tuesday night, oh well by tomorrow night I will be done! I have to take a test for another class tomorrow, then I will officially be done with my school stuff for the week!! My daughter will be so jealous. She laughs at me when I am still doing school work and she is done for the week! I think I can totally handle more classes next term, provided I can get into any, since today was early registration and I wasn't able to get a hold of anyone to get me signed up for classes. When the advisor who helped me registar for classes this fall told me to start with one or two classes to see if online learning was for me, I was very scared thinking this was going to be REALLY hard. However I have found this to be very easy, now I want to try a Math class, since everyone says those are really hard to do online! May as well see what I am up against for the next however many years it takes me to get a degree!!

This week was fairly simple. I will say Access has been difficult! I have actually had to work through all the samples instead of just skimming them. I am ready to move onto Power point, I think that will be fun!

WEEK 6

DOWN.....Six to go?? This week was AWESOME! So easy. Access did take me a while since I have never worked in it. It was fun to learn something totally NEW! I also spent hours on my web pages, I might go play with those some more! It was fun learning the codes, my Mom said in no time I will be a computer nerd like HER! It is Wednesday night and I am done! With both of my classes. I am seriously considering taking more classes next term. But I don't think all my classes will be as easy as these two have been, so I am kinda scared to take on more, but I want to finish sometime before I am 40!!

Onto my personal life.....anything interesting? Not really, except the STUPID wind in Mountain Home ruined my patio table. We just got this table last summer! The lovely fall wind came up and dumped it over, this was not a small, light table. This was a rectangle table with a glass top! Now its a rectangle table with NO top! Lucky for me I am married to a contractor and he is going to put a Formica top on it, then it will be INDESTRUCTIBLE!! This is the second big thing of mine the wind destroyed, last spring it took the kids trampoline, they had only had it for a few months!

I HATE THE MOUNTAIN HOME WIND!!!
But I do like living in Mountain Home (actually the middle of nowhere outside Mountain Home)

MID-TERM????

Are we already half way through this term?? If so, I can handle this college thing!! This week was similar to other weeks, but two assignments made me think a little. I had to stop and contemplate what approach I wanted to use. This class is taking about the same amount of time. Excel, was again a little difficult. I am excited to start into access. I have never used that program. I am very pleased with the grade I am receiving, even though I bombed one quiz, well I guess I didn't bomb, but I sure didn't do very well! :)

I just finished reading 'The Time Travelers Wife' I am not sure I liked it. I liked the concept of time travel and I liked that he wove in and out of her life. I did not like that he could not change anything, that what was to happen would happen and he had no control over it. I probably hated that aspect because I hate it when I see that in real life! When people say: I can't control anything, I can't get a better job, I can't teach my kids better, ect, ect. We are in control of our lives! There are things we cannot control, but we can control how we will react and what our next step will be! It also had some bad language, I can handle some but not much, and this had more than I liked.

Life in FULL SWING!

This week was a VERY busy week! Between 5 different activities for the kids, home school, my schooling and my first COLLEGE EXAM (Which I aced!!) we were running every which way!

This class is taking about the same amount of time it has taken. Excel was a little hard for me. I haven't worked with excel in YEARS, and when I did work with it, it was only for a class, so I haven't used it much.

On to funner things: What you get when a 10 year old has too much time, and access to a camera???

Pet Shop UNO of course!


This made my husband laugh out loud so I had to share it!

SNOW??

SNOW in the first week of October?? I am not talking about a nice little dusting, I am talking about SNOW!! This is the view from my kitchen window. Usually it looks like this mid-winter, ya know January or so. Not October!! My husband was up camping when it hit, they came out of the hills in 7 inches of snow! CRAZY!

So this week was pretty easy, I was able to mark two things off my list on Monday morning, which was AWESOME!! I already had a facebook page and a myspace page, I also have a personal blog, which my sister says I am neglecting for my school blog! This class is took about 12 hours this week. It takes a while to read through the material in the book as well at the online material. If all of my classes are this enjoyable through this college experience, this will be FUN!! I must say the amount of reading I am doing for this class is cutting into my fun reading! :) I didn't even get my book club book read before the meeting, but I was forgiven! Does that tell you what a nerd I am?? I LOVE book club!!

To go back to school at my age has been so rewarding, when I went for a short time at 19 I didn't realize what a privilege it is to have higher education. I find that I appreciate the knowledge that I am gaining so much more at my age! It was fun to hear that Robin went back at 39, makes me feel a lot better about going back at 31!

Holy Toleto....Tomatoes!!!

OK...so that had nothing to do with this class or any other class I am taking, but THAT does sum up what I have been doing for the last two days! So we had our first HARD frost here about two nights ago, so ya know what that means?? Anything viable left in the gardens had to be picked! So after picking all the tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelon and cantaloupe out of my garden, my mom calls and says.....we have LOTS of tomatoes, you want them? Silly me I said SURE, I hate to see good produce go to waste! An hour of picking later, I come home with 5 Wal-mart bags FULL of beautiful, ripe, red, oblong, Roma tomatoes! Two days later; those 5 Wal-mart bags of tomatoes are spaghetti sauce and tomato soup! YUMMY!

I wanted to post a picture of my beautiful tomatoes, but my sister has my camera!!

So to better answer the questions presented, I kept a journal of this weeks work:

Lab 1 took me a while because I could not figure out the first memory. I knew the ram and I knew the hard drive info. I wasn’t sure what the other memory was supposed to be. I am still not sure if I got that part right! :)

Lab 2 took me a while too, I thought I wanted XP on a new system, but I decided I don’t.It only allows 4 GB of memory to be used; I want more memory then that. My laptop has 4GB and that works for now, but I don’t let the kids load any games onto it.

I have to admit at the beginning of this week I was very overwhelmed at the list of things that needed done, however it is Wednesday morning, and I am done with everything except listening to the elluminate session and publishing this. So it seems I need to work really hard at the beginning of the week on school, and then work hard at the end of the week on household stuff, and my daughter’s home school stuff.

Things I have learned since I started this class:

1) XP will only support up to 4 GB
2) (S) at the end of HTTP(S) stands for secure

I am understanding what we are doing in this class so far, its been mostly review, with just a couple of new things. I am enjoying most all parts of this class, I have enjoyed computers for years now.

It is taking me about 12-16 hours a week to complete the task list. I did spend a lot of time on the window shopping for a computer. I am in the market (but with a much smaller budget!) for a new desktop, so it was really interesting to see what has become the standard since I bought a desktop 8 years ago.

This was being passed around on face book, I thought it was BEAUTIFUL!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEpX2BcB9As

Cyber Saftey

In today's world of lightning fast internet, information superhighways, and purchases just a mouse click away, is there any question of the present or future need for internet safety? As with anything new, there needs to be an entirely new set of rules established. Take our vocabulary as an example, 15 years ago what did 'laptop' mean? It was the place where kids sat on grandpa's knee. Now it has a completely new meaning that is accepted and known to most people. The same applies to our rules of conduct or in this case cyberethics. Another very real concern is teaching our children how to stay safe from predators in this new high speed world. It's also important to teach them how to weed through the plethora of information, to take what is good and discard what is not.

Cyberethics are more important now then they ever have been in the history of time. The internet is a little older and people are agreeing, ethics that are established for person to person contact should be observed online as well. Use the internet for the purposes that is was established; shopping, banking, communication, gaming, networking, and information sharing. Do not use it for bullying, stealing, lying, cheating, or any other unethical practice.

Online predators typically target younger children. They are more trusting, honest, and accessible. Some of the ways to protect your children are; adhere to social networking site age limits, monitor your children at all times when they use the internet, and monitor their sites. Teach your children to never give out personal information and interact only with people whom they know in person. There are also a number of filters available that allow parents to set parameters of what can be accessed. If you believe your child has become the target of a predator contact your local police and keep all communications.

The internet can be a great tool to retrieve useful information. It has also become a tool for those propagating hate, bias, and stereotyping. When teaching our children to spot misinformation online, it is done in the same manner as with other forms of information. The first question to ask is; can you trust the source, what is their agenda, are they trying to sell you something? We teach our children tolerance, patience, love and kindness. These lessons should spill into internet usage.

In conclusion, the internet is a powerful tool or a powerful weapon, depending on how we decide to use it. When we bring common sense and the golden rule into internet interactions, we will have complete cybersaftey.


Here is the synopsis you asked for. I hope this is adequate. Actually I hope you love it! I am fairly comfortable with Microsoft office 2007 and computers in general. I have set up a couple of networks, nothing fancy, one for my husbands office and one in my home. I have added memory to my motherboard, and I have installed a CD burner in my desktop. Sadly my desktop finally died after 7 years and I cannot revive it. I am enjoying this computer class, now I have a reason for being online and playing on my computer! I guess Facebook wasn't a good enough reason.