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: