Second Life – Orientation

Second Life is a free online global environment where users interact with each other in a variety of different ways to help continued brain growth. It’s a social experience that the director, Lynne, and her assistant, Madeline, have geared towards helping the elderly exercise their minds to learn technology. During this orientation at the Elm Hall lobby, the students and I were able to see the online world in action with the avatars and were given an overview of how to install the software. We explored different landmarks by such as the Orientation Area, Inspiration Island, and the Grove of Wisdom by moving the avatar and adjusting the camera. It is fascinating to have learned that some users stream piano music through Second Life and that there is a teacher from South Africa who teaches world music.

Teaching – PowerPoint Effects – Lesson 5

Nuvi and I had tons of laughs when we went through all of PowerPoint’s slide transition and animation effects for her slides, pictures, and text! As Nuvi became more familiar with PowerPoint’s menus and tabs, she was able to choose all of the different animation effects. After she tried out all of the effects, we played her slide show presentation. Seeing everything in action was very exciting for her and I loved seeing her having an awesome time! Finally, I demonstrated how to save her work with the “File, Save As” drop down menu.

Nuvi’s favorite part was working with the shapes to make her text more exciting and simply just learning PowerPoint. She said she is now confident to know what others talk about for the next time she hears PowerPoint being mentioned in conversations. Navigating is better and she knows where things are so she is no longer afraid of using the buttons and mouse. Just like our previous learning sessions, Nuvi expressed that my message was clear when teaching and it is easy to learn with me. She thanked me many times since she was so grateful to learn everything I taught her and that she will apply what she learned with PowerPoint whenever she can make a food presentation for those she cooks for.

Nuvi and I with her finished presentation can be seen here!

Teaching – PowerPoint Pictures – Lesson 4

To customize Nuvi’s presentation, we went through the steps of editing her pictures. First, I instructed Nuvi to go to Google Images so she used the mouse to scroll through a variety of pictures from Berlin. Nuvi really enjoyed clicking at the pictures and found a beautiful picture of restaurants and pubs to copy and paste to her slide.

Nuvi learned about hue, saturation, borders, reflections, lighting, and artistic effects. She was able to rotate her picture with the gears found on the four corners of the picture. By using the mouse, she was able to stretch her picture to make it larger and smaller. I explained to her how to click and drag her picture anywhere on the slide. Further, I identified where to insert pictures automatically through selecting the icon on the placeholder box and choosing a picture from a file. She was able to navigate to the drop down menu to insert a video file as well as copy and paste a YouTube video link.

Take a look at how Nuvi did an awesome job of editing her picture!

Teaching – PowerPoint Fonts– Lesson 3

Since my neighbor Nuvi loves cooking and traveling, PowerPoint was the perfect skill to teach so she can create future presentations that display her pictures of food and places! Nuvi has been excited to learn PowerPoint since she told me the last time we met so it was a pleasure to share what I know with her.

To get started, I showed her around the interface, the tabs, and the buttons for designing her very own slide show about Berlin, one of her favorite places she has been to many times. I let Nuvi take the mouse and keyboard to type her presentation heading and her name: “My Travels, By Nuvi.” Then, I introduced her to the menu that has the different character options, styles, and colors she can add to words while explaining that this allows the presenter to have a stronger and much more memorable presentation. This completed slide one for her introduction.

Here you can see Nuvi’s introduction slide! In our next lesson, “PowerPoint Pictures,” we explored Google Images and looked around some beautiful pictures of Berlin for slide two!