1/31

So all of today was very "timey," in the sense that there was a lot that needed to be done or gone through but only a set limited amount of time so a lot of plans had to be cut out the schedule.

In the morning with the freshmen, work time for their Web BTW projects had to be cut out of the schedule for time's sake in order to make time for the ITA Jeopardy, the PPT Road Test, and the Dreamweaver Permit test. So next session that will definitely be one of the first things that needs to be done. But other than that, we got through everything pretty smoothly.

In the afternoon with Photoshop, the same problem of insufficient time came up. The original plan was to have Elizabeth's photo restoration and enhacement section go for about an hour, my compositing section go for another hour, and then have Pacal's "fix your face" activity go for the remaining 445 minutes or so. However, although things didn't go as planned, I think the students got a lot out of the session today from me and Elizabeth's presentation. Elizabeth's presentation did such a good job incorporating the "bigger picture" theme into her lesson but the only thing is that hers ended up being about an hour and a half so that made my presentation have to be cut for time's sake. A big reason why Elizabeth's lesson went so long was because of the discussions I think, so in the future, although the discussions are important becasue they bring up the bigger picture theme, we might have to cut back on them a bit.

But because of the time problem, my lesson seemed a bit rushed becasue I was going to try to get through everything I planned to get through and still leave time for Pacal and his setion. So what ended up happening becasue of my rushed plan is that those who already had a decent feel for the program caught on pretty well with what I was covering but those that didn't have as good a grasp of the program kinda began to fall behind--so we might have to go through compositing again in order to get more in depth as I had planned originally. So for next session we'll probably reintroduce compositing, get through it, and then go into the "fix your photo" project with Pacal.

Freshman & Photoshop 1/17

The morning with the freshman didn't go as well as it couldv'e i think mainly because a lot of the students were already finished with their BTW powerpoints so while the others were still working, they didn't really have anything to do. But once everyone was finished, we had them present their powerpoints in the front of the class, so that went pretty good.
I think the Showcase introduction went great though. I feel I spoke loud enough and made an engaging enough powerpoint to get keep the students' attention on the topic and they seemed pretty interested in the idea of making their own invention.
But after the showcase, when we started the html/css review I felt like I couldn't really do much becasue of my lack of knowledge in that department. I was looking at the permit test for it to try to see what I could help out with in reviewing but I wasn't to sure I knew a lot of the material ont he test so i just let Tony cover the html/css review for the most part.

The afternoon with Photoshop went good and it was pretty fun I think for the instructors as well as the students. We started off showing them some of the basics about the program and what they can do with it as far as making money doing professional layouts and what not. So that introduction got the students pretty interested, not to mention that Photoshop is just a cool program to work with in general so they were already pretty interested. But I think they really had fun with the pacman fix challenege and the kidmixtape walk through as well.

Portfolios 1/3

The portfolio session seems to be one of the more tiring units because there were a lot of questions that arose between the freshman class in the morning and the sophomore class in the afternoon. That might be because of the fact that I only had about a day to prepare the lesson plan/power point or just because of the fact that it was either so much or not enough to do that some of the kids were confused as to what they should do next. For example: the freshman class didn't have much to add to their portfolio as of yet simply because they haven't been in the program for long and they haven't necessarily had the opportunity to create work in the programs taught here--so the most that they could add to it really was just the web pages that they made during the summer. The sophomores, however, had a lot to do and seemed pretty motivated to add a lot of content to their portfolios since they have had the opportunity to build a decent amount of work from different programs. Either way, both classes asked a lot of questions. Another reason this session might have seemed pretty tiring is because not that many students were present today so at times it was kind of like the energy was just sucked out of the room. Some things that I would like to do more with this unit is work with students who are actually interested in creating and incorporating their own design into their portfolio instead of the one provided, because ot was fun showing them how to change the color of the border and the border style. Allowing more time for more thought to go into this lesson plan would help for next time.