Learn to use the most popular Open Source Photo Editing and Microsoft tools in the context of creating successful reports, analysis, and presentations for school. The skills mastered in the course will help students to successfully produce materials for their other courses both in middle school, high school, and on into college. Tools taught will include: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Gimp photo-editing (a free photoshop tool). Students will also be able to transfer the skills learned over to use with other packages such as Open Office and Libre Office. Following is an outline of skills students will learn with each tool.

Microsoft Word – Students will create a report with elements and structure similar to a research report. To engage their interest, they will about a topic of their choice (Catholic School appropriate) while grasping the skills of formatting reports including: creating a cover page with artwork; auto-generating a table of contents, data tables, footnotes, endnotes, bulleted text, and several other elements.

Microsoft Excel – Students will learn basic skills such as formatting, calculation, and analysis while creating engaging products such as crosswords, a battleship game, a word search, and analyzing data for a trip to a destination of their choice. In my years as an educator, I’ve had more than one former student report that college teachers just assume that they’ve learned how to use a spreadsheet.

Microsoft PowerPoint – Students will learn formatting and animation while producing a music video.

Gimp – Students will learn how to crop, layer, blend, touch-up, and filter images. This will also teach them to analyze images that they encounter, and question how they were created and manipulated.