Week 2 - MS Publisher & E-Portfolios

Microsoft Publisher

In today's session we learnt how to make brochures in Microsoft Publisher. We made a brochure about the Shrine of Remembrance for our Humanities assignment in semester one using Publisher so I am vaguely familiar with the program. I quite like using the Microsoft programs as you can use the help menu to find out how to do pretty much anything. Or if the help menu is a bit confusing whatever you need to know you can always find on Google (along with a whole heap of rubbish you didn't need to know but got distracted by!)

I made a brochure about Kyrgyzstan, I visited Kyrgyzstan with my husband in 2007. I have taken photos from our online photo storage with Picasa and used them in my brochure. The text is from a blog I wrote about our experience staying in the Yurt Life Camp in Tash Rabat.

Kyrgyzstan is a brilliant place, I highly recommend it as a travel destination (even if my very rushed brochure doesn't do a great job of selling it).

MS Publisher looks like it could have some great applications in my Primary classroom, the only limitations being mine and my student's imaginations. The range of templates that you can use mean that students have a good base to work from and hopefully will not waste too much time fiddling with the format and be able to concentrate on the content. From my limited experience so far with children and computers I have realised that a lot of time can be wasted fiddling with fonts, headings, backgrounds and layouts and a lot of ink can subsequently be wasted as well!

Just so that I wouldn't forget I wrote down the steps that I followed to create my brochure.

Creating a brochure in MS Publisher:

• choose brochure


• choose template


• choose colour scheme


• fill in the boxes, you can: cut, copy, move and resize them


• it's bit tricky when your text flows over a page but cutting your text from MS Word helps to fix this


• it's also sometimes a little difficult to paste pictures directly into the brochure but by pasting into MS Word first that will fix this


• choose file/web page prievew to enable a good screen shot that can then be uploaded to your blog or anywhere else

E-portfolio

This week we were also shown an E-portfolio for a Primary school student in our lecture. I shuddered to think how much work the teacher and student had put into compiling the portfolio however, it was a very impressive way to showcase the students work and progress. I imagine that if the school had their E-portfolio's well set up (template wise) then it wouldn't be too hard to do one for each student especially in upper primary when the students could help to compile their own portfolios. In contrast to this though I can also imagine a lot of hours spent putting them together especially for younger students who aren't yet better at ICT than I am!

This is a page from my developing E-portfolio. I intend to use this as part of my material when applying for jobs in the future.

I am a Mac user at home so created my portfolio using iWeb. iWeb is simple to use and the templates are quite nice. It's a little bit fiddly to change all the colours and font but I think that is probably my own fault at this stage.

I managed to work out everything I needed to do by watching the video tutorial and Googling a few things that I was stuck on e.g how to save it!