Photo Editing!!!

Fellow teachers: For all of your visual learners out there, wouldn’t it be neat to provide them with awesome images to increase their learning? There are ways to enhance pictures and images to direct your students’ focus to what is important and provide them with a quality visual experience. You may have heard of Photoshop, but who has a spare $900 lying around? There are many other editing programs at a much cheaper cost and they work nearly the same. Photoshop Elements is just under $100 (which for me is still too much). Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have free 30 day trials, if you think that you can get all of your editing done in one month, feel free to try out those options. A much cheaper, slightly less quality, option is to download Gimp or Paint.net. Both of these programs have similar tools and both can help you edit photos to help all the visual learners in your classroom.
Now you’re thinking, “Great, here are these editing programs, but how the heck do I use them?”
I always think that the best way to learn something is by trial and error. Chose an image and play around with it until you figure out what everything can do. It is nice to know a little bit about what some of the tools are meant for, however, so I will try and guide you through a few of the tools that I think are the most beneficial and useful for my editing purposes.

Copy your image:
The very first thing to do when you open an image is to make a copy of it. How sad would it be to make all these cool changes, then make a mistake, and lose the image completely? It’s always better to start from the beginning than it is to start from scratch. Besides, it’s cool to look at the before and after images. To make a copy, in the bottom right hand corner there will be an area with all your layers. Right click on your image and chose the option to ‘duplicate layer’. This should then leave you with two layers in your layers box.



















Healing Brush:
First of all, when I think of Photoshop, I think of getting rid of nasty blemishes and zits I might have had on family picture day! How might I get rid of them, you might wonder, there are two ways to work through this problem. The first way that I would choose is the Healing Brush. It will be on the right hand side with an icon that looks like a Band-Aid. Once you have clicked on it, find an area on the image that closely matches the area you want to cover up (probably right next to the blemish), then you’ll hold down the option or control key and click. Move your mouse over the blemish and click, wiggling your mouse a bit to fully cover the area. When you let go, the image will make an adjustment using the area you wanted to match the area you covered. You might have to repeat the steps a few times until you get the desired results.



















Clone Stamp:
Another way to cover blemishes is to use the Clone Stamp tool. This tool looks like a red and yellow stamp. Similar to the Healing Brush, you’ll choose an area that looks closest to where you want to cover it up. Again, push the option key over your good area, then color over the blemish. This time you can watch where your mouse is covering and it is making an exact copy (or clone) of the area you chose to cover it up with. Experiment with it and try it out!













Burn and Dodge Tools:
A couple more tools that I really like using are the Burn and Dodge tools. These are located under the same icon. You have to click and hold to get all the options, but usually it is automatically on the Burn tool that looks like a grey fist. This tool darkens your image. I use this for making the background darker, thus causing the foreground image stand out a little more. Opposite of that is the Dodge tool. This tool makes the image lighter and can be used to highlight areas, or bring out the entire foreground. Sometimes it is cool to use the burn tool and the dodge tool, but be careful of making too big of a contrast.




















These are my favorite tools in Photoshop. Like I said before, play around with it and see what you can do!!

Instructional Architect

Here is my cool new page about Volcanoes!! Check it out!

Photoshop!!

So, I just learned how to use photoshop. I love some of the awesome features that I learned. And it has already come in handy. I have this one wedding picture where I have some flaky skin on my nose. Photoshop fixed it and my nose looks perfect. :) True, photoshop could completely alter reality sometimes, but that can be beneficial, also!!

I would like using something like photoshop in my future classroom so that the kids could create cool collages of a class field trip, or make pictures of a book they've read, or perhaps make a journal/book about their year in school. Photoshop could help them enjoy doing these projects and give them lots of options to enhance their creativity.

I have always been interested in photography. Now I have more reasons to go out and take pictures. It makes me excited that I can alter and perfect different images. I'm ready to play around with it some more!

web pages

Wow. I learned how to make web pages by exporting something in 'Inspiration' to the web. You can see it here. It is pretty fascinating and amazing to learn all these things about how computers work. I like feeling a little more educated about technology. I might be able to use this technology in my future classroom if I was having kids do a book report....they could make a diagram of the main ideas of the book. Or they could brainstorm for a creative writing project, etc. Cool things to know!!

Blogs!!!

I am a big fan of blogs. I have not been using them for very long, but now that I have learned more about them I think that it is a great way to communicate with other people. I have been able to find a bunch of people in my family and in my ward and old college friends who have blogs as well and it is very fun to see updates on their lives. I think it will also be a fantastic way to keep the parents involved in what's going on in my classroom. I won't always want to send an e-mail out to every parent to tell them about the week, but if I publish a blog post, they'll be able to see what's happening.
I also like the feature to be able to comment on someones post. My family has been in a lot more contact with each other ever since we decided blogging. And if each of the parents in the classroom have access to my blog, they'll be able to comment with questions, concerns, ideas, suggestions, or just to say it was a great week their kid enjoyed it!
Having a classroom blog could also act as a journal area for me. I will be able to update on things we are doing in my classroom and I can look back to see what worked and what didn't. If I teach the same grade (or even different grades) I will be able to keep tabs on what was successful, and what I could work on more. It is not only for getting information out to the parents, but it can be useful for me as well!
I will definitely keep using blogs and keep figuring out new things (about blogs and other technologies) that I can do to make my communication with anyone more successful!!

Technology Yesterday and Today!

Technology is changing on a daily basis. Things today aren't what they were last year, or even last week in some cases. As technology advances, it is always entertaining for me to watch my grandparents try to grasp what is happening. My grandma lived back in the time when people made their own clothing and cooked from scratch. Modern life has become overly quickened and simplified. As far as my grandparents go, it is often hard to 'teach an old dog new tricks', but at the same time, they have benefited from the advances in technology as well.
I am only 20 years old, but even in my lifetime I have noticed so many things burst forth in front of my face. I feel like I am already falling behind. Just three days ago I had to ask my husband how to use my flash drive. Teenagers, pre-teen, and even elementary kids can do more than I can when it comes to computers. If I were to keep up with all this new and modern technology I would have no time to do anything else, but these kids are being brought up with it surrounding them day in and day out.
I wonder sometimes how I am going to be able to teach these elementary age students without using so much computer assistance. I realize that the reason they are so familiar with it is because they spend so much time in front of the computer when they are at home. I want to be able to give them a break from it when they are at school, but at the same time, that's what they are used to and feel comfortable with.
I'm torn between both sides. I think that technology is a great tool and can be used in so many positive and beneficial ways, but I also feel like it is being over used and is somewhat burdensome. I, myself, being a Junior in college, often hate how much of my homework is done through blackboard. I have to read a million articles posted to the library reserve site. I have to take quizzes and submit them on blackboard. I have to write papers and turn them in on the internet. Yes it saves paper and sometimes saves class time, but it gets to be too much. I'm sorry, but staring at a computer screen for 5 hours a night is not fun. I'd appreciate a real textbook every once in a while. Give me a quiz on paper. Let me hand write a paper every so often. I swear, technology is going to be the death of me someday. Staring at a computer screen can't be good for our eyesight, texting has caused arthritis, and the energy to run a computer could be saved by reading a book instead.
I don't know. It has always been a big pet peeve of mine. Let technology be used to benefit a learning environment, but in moderation. Old dogs can learn new tricks, so computers should be used to teach these kids who have grown up with them, but help them understand the benefits of 'old fashioned' learning as well!!
I'm sure there is a way to keep all generations happy. Lets learn from each other and stop worrying about it so much!

Welcome to my blog

Hello!! I just created a blog for my INST 4010 class. I will be posting various assignments for this class throughout the semester. Enjoy!