Powerpoint blog

This was an easy and a frustrating project for me.  I use PowerPoint, on a weekly, and in years past daily basis.  I'm familiar with the ins and outs, and am very comfortable with the program.  I honestly can't say that I learned a whole lot, or had a great deal of struggle (other than finding the motivation to finish this).  My biggest struggle, was I suppose, following the 6X6 rule, it forced me to get creative with my wording.  While I agree with the spirit of the rule, keeping PowerPoints simple, I feel that it confined my writing and made the information I put out choppy, and more difficult to understand than it would have been otherwise.  I feel like an idea based rule, maybe one idea/slide would be better suited.  One would still be able to present information in a clear and accessible way that keeps attention, but also not have to chop up ideas.  The future of PowerPoints for me is interesting.  We're going away from them in the classroom, turning more to Prezi's and frankly more and more towards student based learning.  Regardless I will always use Powerpoints.

Before and After Photoshop image editing.

 The first image is my original.  It was a photo my wife took a couple of weekends ago at a race I ran of my daughter and I.  I loved the image and thought it would be perfect to edit.  The first thing I did for my filter image was to crop and rotate the picture.  The original was crooked, so I went in and fixed that.   I then proceeded to play with the auto color feature.  I didn't like how that worked out so I tinkered with the brightness and contrast till I was happy.  Next I added a cooling filter which I particularly, like. To finish I added an anti-shake smart filter.  I don't think it did much but I wanted to play around with it. 

For my Polaroid montage I used my edited image.  I created layers made one black and one white.  selected a portion of my original image, then created a clipping mask.  I then created another for my white background.  I then grouped the layers and proceeded to make a whole bunch of copies of the group.  Once I had the copies I repositioned each group using the free transform tool to get the image I have.  Lastly I saved using the png file type so that I could have a manageable file size.  My biggest obstacle was the intensive amount of time it took to learn and feel comfortable enough to start playing around, hours and hours.  This was much more difficult for me than the Dreamweaver projects.  However, I feel good about what I created and the more I tinker with Photoshop the more comfortable I will become.

Photoshop, as opposed to Dreamweaver, is a more universal tool.  Images are so pervasive I can see myself using these skills almost daily, as both an educator and as a person.  My wife is particularly excited that I at least have a rudimentary understanding so I can make the family Christmas Card (joy of joys...).

Dreamweaver Prjoect.

For my instructional website I created a page that described how to write a research paper.  I went in order of paragraphs, and included thesis writing instructions. This is a project that I struggled with mightily but really enjoyed.  I had trouble with everything from uploading to getting the CSS to align and work with the HTML, to actually having functioning code that made sense and worked in a logical way.  However, the more I tinkered and played with the more competent I became and the more I enjoyed the project.  It is incredibly rewarding to create something from scratch.  Particularly when a month ago you had no idea how to do any of this.  Going forward I expect to code a few websites for both my classroom and my church and  I am looking forward to tinkering with some of the dreamweaver features for mobile websites.

My website looks like this:

Audio Reflection

This unit required me to become familiar with a variety of new tools and techniques, in particular Audacity.  I enjoyed using Audicity to record my podcast and then import and add music to it.  It was fairly simple and straightforward.  In the future this is a program that I think my students can easily use to make podcasts.   I enjoyed the process of making the podcast, and felt pretty good about it. 

I struggled mightily with this unit.  Figuring out how to access the files once they were uploaded to my comp account and then the coding in my blog.  With both of the issues I solved with persistence, or as my wife says banging my head against a wall until I see progress.  With practice, I think that I will become much more proficient with these problems, and frankly I doubt that they will continue to be problems.

Podcast

Word Accesibility Project

As someone who is computer literate I feel pretty comfortable with Word.  I know how to use it's basic features, and even some of the advanced ones.  I had never used or heard of the accesibility features.  I had always found the heading options an obnoxious accessorie that often messed up my formating.  I learned though that they play a vital role in allowing people with dissabilities to use documents. 

To complete this project I created an install manual for a piece of software called ActivInspire.  It is interactive whiteboard software that my district uses and the install (and frankly the operation) can be fairly clunky.  In creating my manual I struggled with the images.  I used a ton, to help illustrate the directions, and for each I needed to have alt text.  The problem?  My main computer, a Mac, didn't have the option of adding alt text in Word.  I worked around this by using my school computer.  I'm very pleased with my result.  I've created a document that will be used across my district for the next few years to help install a vital piece of software.  I created something, that before starting this project I had no idea existed, let alone was capable of creating.  I also created something that people with disabilites will be able to use and access.

In my classroom I am striving to be as paperless as possible.  As I reach towards that goal, accessibility becomes a big issue.  These lessons will allow me to create documents that I use in class that are accessible, and will be able to be used by all of my students.

The purpose of a blog

I've never liked blogs.  I suppose I've always been too much of an egotist and too bad of a writer to really get into them.  I've tried a few.  When I was an undergrad I had a Xanga, it was possibly the worst writing in the history of mankind.  My wife found the site a few years after we got married and she still won't let me live it down.  With that said social media has become the time capsule of our generation.  It is where we chronicle our highs and our lows.  Our triumphs and our defeats.  It is the diary of the 21st century, and for better or for worse it is on the web for the entire world to see.

I'm a history teacher, one of my favorite things to do in the classroom is to introduce my students to things that were written in the past.  Napoleon's letters are great, so is anything written by presidents or kings long past.  My favorite though, is a diary by German Jew named Victor Klemperer.  In the book I Will Bear Witness 1942-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years we see Klemperer's diary.  His life under the oppression of the Nazi's.  Klemperer, you see, was a professor who married an Arian woman.  Because of this he was able to avoid the fate of the majority of Jews in Nazi occupied territory.  He describes his life keeping track of every event in order to preserve a record for future generations.  I am, by no means whatsoever, anything close to Victor Klemperer.  I'm an average writer at best with a wonderfully boring life.  My blog though can still be useful, it can still be a record of my life and of this times.  How neat would it be in a hundred to have a researcher site my blog in his thesis on Education:Successes and Failures of the Twenty first Century.  One can dream I suppose.