Shellae’s Education Blog

It has definitely been a rough week, with my son in the hospital and my husband & I getting sick, but I finally finished my audio project.  I had a difficult time deciding what to do but as I was playing the piano, I decided to start the project with a piano introduction then read part of my favorite book of the Bible, James.  Hope you like it.

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Tags: Amazing Grace, Bible reading, James 1, James 2

I subscribed to a couple podiobooks 2 weeks ago and it came in somewhat handy this weekend.  My son has been in the hospital (finally released about an hour ago) so this gave me something to listen to while I sat there watching him sleep.  The book itself if good (what I have listened to) but I did find one glitch.  When I set up the initial subscription, I set it to add a new podcast every other day.  Unfortunately, since I did not always turn on iTunes daily, not all of the successive chapters downloaded.  I didn’t realize this until I was listening to the book and suddenly I was lost; something was missing.  Had I not paying attention?  Had I dozed off?  When I started examining the downloads, I noticed that some of the chapters were missing.  Lesson learned.  If you are not online (with iTunes up) on a daily basis then it would be better to download the entire book but you can still listen to it one podcast at a time.

I know it is not supposed to have a title but I couldn’t help myself.  Don’t worry, all the kids pictured here are mine and I am officially giving them permission to be in my project.

I have not written much lately because I have been working on a very special project for my momaw.  A few months ago, momaw’s nephew found an old picture under a matress and it turned out to be a picture of my momaw when she was about a month old being held by her mother.  This was such a special find because my great-grandmother died when my momaw was just 2 years old and momaw did not have any pictures of her mother.  The picture was on a cardboard backing and it was badly decayed.  Over the years, people had tried to tape it together which made it even more deformed.  I didn’t think there was much that I could do but I took a picture of the picture and got a a friend to try to help me restore the picture using Photoshop.

We began by lightening the picture and using the patch tool to try to correct sone of the worse areas.  Then we put a soft overlay on the picture to add to the antique flare.  Some areas were too badly decayed to fix, such as one of the baby’s eyes and the mother’s pinkie finger, so we drew a closed eye and used a copied layer of the index finger and resized it to make a pinkie finger.  We then kept adjusting the levels, brightness, color balance, and contrast until we had finally created a picture that we were pleased with.  This project took massive amounts of tiral and error but in the end, it was well worth the effort.  I then printed a 16 x 20 picture on convas and framed it for Momaw.  Needless to say, she loved it and actually so did I.

This is what the picture finally looked like when we finished it.

I enjoyed the sense of accpmplishment that I got from this that I decided to start someing else for Momaw’s birthday (yesterday).  I went back through all the old photos that I could find and created a book for her.  By using Photoshop to edit the pictures and software that I downloaded from Mpix, I made a book that began with my great-great-grandparents and ended with pictures from now.  All total, there were six generations of our family in the book.  The thing that I like about the Mpix software is that you can also add text so the book turned out more like a story of her life with pictures as the added bonus.  The book is hard-bound and had 20 pages inside.  If you are interested in projects like this, I definitely recommend Mpix for the publishing.  Check it out.

I have played around with some pictures in the past and the contrast of color on black and white is a time consuming endeavor for me but it is well worth it.  When we visit different places, I love to exam the landscape.  The differnt trees and flowers are of particular interest to us so we take pictures of almost everything.   This particular picture was taken on our trip to Germany last summer.  The roses are everywhere there and it seemd that they were all different.  The most difficult part of taking a good picture of flowers is capturing the detail of each petal.

I used Photoshop to edit this picture.  First I opened the picture I wanted to use and created a new project.  Then I dragged my picture onto the new project background and set the mode to grayscale.  Then I adjusted the brightness and contrast to get the desired effect and flattened the image.  Next, I went back to my oritinal picture and outlined the section that I wanted to have in color and copied it as a new layer.  I drug this layer onto my project then erased any excess around the flower.  Finally, this project is complete.  Hope you enjoy!!! 

I really enjoyed this new facet of photo manipulation. I have been using Adobe for several years but this is something that i never thought about doing. When I looked at the cross with the beautiful background, Heaven is the only word that came to mind. Adding the contrasting background color with the mosaic filter made the picture stand out even more. This could be a useful tool in the class to add creativity and imagination to what could otherwise be boring more of the same. This type of application could used,for example, in my chemistry class to identify the elements with the element name in type and a picture of the element as the background picture. They could then be organized in a merged poster or printed to be organized on the wall in the shape of the periodic table.

I am actually glad that this class has gotten off to a slow start because of weather issues and personal sickness but I am hoping to gain a new perspective on tools that can be used in the classroom.  I really do not like the book thus far because it reminds me of reading a history book that was written by a high school student who is trying to follow the guidelines of writing an essay.  The first chapter was mostly a summation of what the book is going to tell you and who the intended audience is supposed to be.  Then the next chapter just discusses the use of multimedia and how documentaries and animation began.  I know that you need a background knowledge in anything to get a proper grasp on the present uses and the future so I hope that is where the author is going with this.  

I would really like to learn some applications that I can use in the classroom.  Things that I can create to improve the teaching of my classes and things that my students can use to create projects of their own.  I would love to delve deeper into animation and learn how to create my own animated projects.  I used to have my chemistry students create a comic strip hero based on one of the elements on the periodic table and I would love to take that a step further by letting them actually create the animated character.  

I think it is also important to have resources available that the teachers can pull from whien needed.  A “webliography” might be a good idea to create a list of useful websites with a detailed description of what is contained on that site.  This would help teachers by giving them resources to pull from to use with their students.  Teachers are usually not creators of technology but we do want to apply technology resources and this would give us a list of resources to pull from.