Meaningful projects with clear messages

What ideas and strategies do you envision yourself implementing to help this goal come about?

Revising BTW checklist sheets to make sure they are very specific as to what is expected in the student's project, and also for BTWs and any other projects I will be sure to provide good examples for students to model after as well as a list of specific themes/messages for students to implement into their projects whenever applicable.

Where do you see that you fit into this goal, as an educator in the ITA labs?

the students should be pushed a bit more to think deeper in the process of creating their projects so that there is the "more than meets the eye" aspect to it and as ITA instructors it is in part our responsibility to provide them with the tools they need to encourage that type of progression in their work.

And, what benefits are there for your ability to best facilitate an environment for learning using this goal?

the students get more out of their projects and will hopefully eventually spark something within them sometime down the line to want to push themselves more in whatever they do and to constantly be looking for the underlying message/meaning of things they encounter in their lives. And the instructors get the satisfaction of knowing that they had a hand in helping bring that out of the students.

Photoshop Actions & Scripts Sessions 1 & 2

Session 1

Session 1 started off a bit slow, as it was the first session and the first time ITA had done the Choice Sessions section of the day, as it is a oart after noon lab. This day was all about introducing the concepts behind Photoshop Actions and Sctipts as tools used for increasing project productivity. This day was all about getting students familiar with learning how to use, create/record, save, download & install, load, and incorporate these two aspects of Photoshop in different kinds of projects.

The students seemed to be really amazed at how the actions and scripts were carried out and how much they could accomplish in such a short amount of time once they were run. By the end of the session the students had a couple of different projects they finished; one project was from a batch rename script, one was from an action they downloaded from the internet and loaded into Photoshop, and their last one was from an action they created/recorded themselves.

Overall, it was a pretty informative session; however, next session will definitely need to be a bit more project-oriented (i.e. rather than having the main focus be "actions and scripts within the context of a few projects" it will be more so focused on creating cool projects and/or effects and seeing how actions and/or scripts can aid in that process) in order to ensure students' attentiveness.

Session 2

This session was a lot more interesting for the students, as it was much more project oriented. First we started off with a quick review from last session just about the main purpose of actions and scripts and their many uses, then we jumped right into the first project which was "Reading" actions--this project consisted of downloading an action of a cool effect from the internet (http://www.turningturnip.co.uk/photoshop/photoshop-actions/photo-box-action.php), loading it into Photoshop, viewing its contents/recorded steps, and then finally attempting to re-create the cool effect using the action as a step-by-step guided tutorial. The purpose of this project was to get students more familiar with actions, the process and order at which actions may be recorded, and also to get more familiar with the Photoshop interface and different tools and such, as they encountered many new terms for different Photoshop tools and processes through reading the recorded steps of the action. Unfortunately, this particular action in order to achieve this cool effect was entirely TOOOO long so about a third of the way through reading the action we decided to just stop and hit the "play" button to finish it up...we got super impatient. It would have been nice to actually be able to finish reading the action and doing it ourselves and then to press "play" and see how close/good we were at reading the steps of the action but it was just way too time consuming, so next time I'll be sure to pick a cool effect with an action that has less effects.

Next, the students created their own actions which they saved to their folders for other students to load up and attempt to "read" themselves to see if they could get the same effects (although I think most of them just hit the "play" button...I guess I was having a lot more fun with the reading of actions then most of the students).

The final project of the day was a walk through project called "Clipping Mask Collage." The students really enjoyed this project and were very satisfied with their results. This, again, was another way to give the students a bit more experience with creating longer actions and getting a better feel for the idea that not all steps that on may take in Photoshop can be recorded with actions (such as the Brush Tool) and also that sometimes there needs to be a specific order to how you record your actions in order for them to give the same effect when you run them/press play on another image.

Overall it was a pretty successful session, and next session will more centered around scripts.

Unit Plan Structure

I know there haven't been many problems with the class blogs lately but I still have the idea in the back of my mind of a default structure/template of what the class blogs should like/what they should all include as the minimum.

And as for the way we structure our unit plans, I can't really think of anything specifically at the moment other than the idea of complete and thorough lesson plans on the wiki as well as in the form of a powerpoint for each of the units, which is already in progress.

However, my only concern with that is how easily the lesson plan in the powerpoint form will transfer into the classroom when it's actually time to teach because I feel that it may be a bit problematic for new instructors who didn't create the powerpoint to implement their own teaching style into the lesson.

But I guess that issue could be avoided if each new instructor created their own powerpoint for each lesson, which would all be based off the permanent and thorough lesson plans that would be available on the wiki for each unit.

Co-Workers Teaching Styles

So since I was only working with Tony this past Saturday session, my reflection will be about his teaching style based on what I've observed from this Session as well as the the past few sessions.

I've noticed that Tony speaks up loudly whenever he's leading a lesson and also goes through the lesson thoroughly to insure total understanding. He also does a great job when he's working one on one with a student to answer a question or help solve a problem they're having with their project--he also doesn't hesitate to call me over for further help if there's something he's not too sure about.

Some things I noticed that he could improve on a little more are moving around the class more both when he's leading as well as when he isn't. I noticed that Tony tends to stay at the front of the classroom when he's teaching, and at the back when he's not. So that could be something he could work on, moving around while he teaches could grab the students attention more and really make sure that they are paying attention, and moving around while he isn't teaching could ensure again that the students are really paying attention and are not being distracted by facebook or games, etc. as well as be more available for those who may have fallen behing a bit or have questions pertaining to the lesson that the leading instructor might have missed or wouldn't really have time to stop for; so he would be kind of like the eyes in the back of the room for the instructor who's leading at the front and cant catch every little thing with the students.

But yeah, overall he's doing a great job as an instructor of course.

End of the summer blog

-Maybe the only thing I'm wondering about still as far as the role of the unit support and coordinator is the ITA Bugs and how to get them to send the notifications to my gmail instead of my wiscmail. Other than that I think I'm pretty comfortable with everything else as far as the roles of unit support and unit coordinator.

-As far as the system of unit coordinator and support, I feel there could always be a higher level of communication between the two in order to assure things go a lot smoother with less confusion as far as what everyone should or could be doing for the lessons.

-The 3 act structure works just fine and is really a big help when it comes to planning lessons and making time for everything. So no complaints about the 3 act structure at all.

-I really enjoyed the students, units, lessons, and everything we did over the summer in all three camps. I hope we're able to put all the videos up from vegas camp soon because I'm really excited to see the rest of them. And I had some of the most fun getting to know the new freshman.

Blitz Day!

Our blitz video was a satirical commercial about pop ups. I actually chose this topic for our group because I was inspired from the previous two camps in the sections where we talked about computer viruses and safe keep. So I think the biggest thing we learned is that filming takes a lot of re-doing and doing-over and repeating ..and more doing over and repeating after that from different angles in order to make a decent scene. Another thing we learned (or at least me since I was doing most of the directing) is that you should always keep in mind the bigger picture of your movie, meaning you want to keep in mind how different shots and angles will fit together in the composition and where you'll be making cuts and all that good stuff about how the final project will turn out in general. One other thing i'm definitely sure we all learned is that making a movie is a lot of fun. One thing i'm sure we'll all keep in mind for future videos is that we should leave just about enough time for filming as for editing the film.

Summer '09 Goals Survey

-Plan for the session as much as possible as far as making sure everything you have planned will be able to be covered within the session; however, if time is running short, don't feel the need to rush--you can just make up whatever you didn't get to the best you can next session in possibly a more time efficient manner. So i guess it's Quality, not Quantity.

-Always have more planned than you expect to get to so that the students aren't left with unauthorized excess free time to surf the web if they finish early with certain activities.

-Circle discussions/ feedback works very well for checking progress and getting & maintaining momentum.

-"So I guess as an instructor, as much as you would like to, you can't awasy get caught up in being on the students' good side and sometimes it is just really necessary that you be a little more assertive than you regularly are in order to get things done; however, I still believe that a good balance between the two will always keep things going pretty smoothly and not bring up too much tension or anything like that."

-Using downloaded fonts for session powerpoints aren't really the best idea. Lots of problems came up whenever I tried it.

-Take more STT, STS, and/or PTE classes