We reached our first milestone earlier this month: MO-110 Word certification exam. Ten students qualified for, took, and passed their first Microsoft Office Specialist (MOS) certification exam earning their first certificate. One of the ten even achieved the same for MO-310 PowerPoint certification exam :-)
Another milestone is that we crossed the half-point mark of the Fall 2025 semester. Most students have ventured into Chapter 5 Excel. Thirteen students have now occupied the full spectrum of coursework progress: ahead and leading, right where they should be, a little behind, and dangerously behind.
These are the highlights and accolades in the past month since my previous blog post:
Sonia educated the class on one of her cultural roots: Salsa Music Artists. Her draft PowerPoint slideshow was so polished that it was ready for presentation without polishing. Bonus credit earned!
Oliver wet the audience's appetite with Foods that I [Oliver] love to cook and eat. An earlier student presenter offered to make cheeseburger eggrolls for the class before the end of the semester, I wonder...
For Lecture/Demo 3: Using a Table to Format & Align a Design, I shared Actual and Borders Visible.
Brianna resumed playing video games and shared My [Brianna's] Favorite Video Games: Wuthering Waves, Century: Age of Ashes, Tiny Glade, and Honkai: Star Rail with the class.
I gave my double-feature Lecture/Demonstration LD4: The Internet which contribute to Bonus Quizzes 7 through 11. One key topic is my signature way of walking students through how to properly dissect a uniformed resource locator (URL).
Andrew left with a broken rib from the mosh pit at a concert by one of his two favorite rappers: Travis Scott and Playboi Carti. While helping the young concert-goer polishing his draft slideshow, I explained the downside of embedding video clips into his PowerPoint file so he uploaded his concert video clips to YouTube and then provided links to them (Utopia Tour and Complexcon) in his PowerPoint slideshow as mitigation.
As I draft this blog post and verify the two links, I see that his YoutTube account has been set to private. The key downside of linking to a file/object (e.g. a video clip) instead of embedding it to the destination file (e.g. slideshow) is that you may lose access to the source file/object for various reasons such as the source file/object is no longer available, location/path of the source file/object changed, or you lost internet/network connectivity.
Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) will be the theme for a later assignment, A7 Mail Merge, and future Bonus Quiz 14. Both of which are worth half a letter grade of IS101-3210, Fall 2025. I will elaborate more on OLE on my next blog post.
The most interactive LD from my signature set of lectures, demonstrations, and walkthroughs is LD5 Straight Average vs. Weighted Average. The title only reflects half of the LD5 experience. LD5 is so valuable that I walked through it again on the following classroom session. Oliver captured Impromptu Bonus Challenge 3 as he keenly realized during the LD5 experience when it was no longer about which average to use and correctly provided the logic to calculate the answer.
Students began taking their first MOS certification exam. By the time of this blog post, ten students qualified for, took, and passed the MO-110 Word certification exam. Earl not only earned the highest score so far on MO-110 but worked ahead to qualify, took, and passed the MO-310 PowerPoint certification exam. I am proud of Earl, Naxaly, Audrey, Brianna, A'marian, Andrew, Cassandra, Andrea, Alicia, and Luis.
Earl not only leads in the exams but continues to earn the highest score bonus quizzes as well:
BQ6 – Shortcut, Recycle Bin, and File Types
BQ7 – TCP/IP, URL, and Generic Top-Level Domains
BQ8 – Domain Name Registration, ccTLD Hack, and URL Parts
Cassandra broke through her shell to tell the class Why I [Cassandra] Love Art. Her realistic pencil drawings definitely made an impression on me but what I will remember for a long time is her statement during the Q & A post-presentation: "separate the art from the person" and the context behind it.
I separated LD6 Key Excel Concepts and Skills into two parts since I walked through LD5 twice and ate up time from LD6. Next week, I will walk through the second part of LD6. I hope I will see more participations on the bonus quizzes and those who are behind in their coursework catch-up.
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%20L4%20The%20Internet%20(Albert%20Wu).png)
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Students,
At the time of this blog post, ten students earned their first MOS certificate -- two for Earl. It would be a shame if no one outside of IS101-3210, Fall 2025 knows about your accomplishment. Yes, you can download a PDF version of your MOS Word Associate certificate and/or MOS PowerPoint Associate certificate from your Certiport.com account and share the PDF(s) with a potential employer.
But the most professional -- and verifiable -- way for a potential employer to accept that the certificate is authentic is for the potential employer to visit https://verify.certiport.com/ and input/copy-and-paste your certificate code (a unique code listed on each of your MOS certificate) for Certiport to authoritatively display that specific MOS certificate bearing your name and the software application in question.
(1) Will you implement a way for a visitor to your blog to do the above? If you have yet to earn your first MOS certificate, what is your strategy to qualify for the MO-110 Word certification exam?
(2) How does your experience in Chapter 5 Excel differ from that in Chapter 4 Word? If you have yet to start on Chapter 5 Excel, what changes will you make in your life so you can devote more time and energy to catch-up so you don't miss out on MO-210 Excel certification exam?
(3) Most students that reach the end of the semester land in the B+/A- zone. Bonus Quizzes can give you the needed push to the top. Bonus Quizzes 7 through 11 (study guides are in Canvas) are based on LD4: The Internet. Until I review the answers of each BQ with you or when I announce their closure, they are available for you to do. Will you take advantage of this opportunity?
(4) Anything else on your mind? What are your thoughts on the presentations you have seen from your classmates, including the ones prior to this blog post? What are your thoughts on the lecture/demonstrations from me?
