First Full Semester of Graduate School!

I have made it through my first full semester of Graduate school...AND I have a 4.0! I would say that equals SUCCESS! Next semester may be a little more difficult as I venture in to writing my first three chapters and proposing before my commitee!

End of the semester is here and this is my final assignment for ETEC5213. We were asked to create a recorded message discussing the differences between downloadable audio files and podcasts. Audacity is a free recording software and very simple to use. There are also tutorials available for using many of the tools within the program. I simply recorded the message and then imported an mp3 music file to lay in behind my recording. I then exported the file into an mp3. When downloading Audacity you are prompted to also downloaded "LAME for Audacity" which allows you to change from the ".aud" to a ".mp3". The hardest part of this post was making sure the mp3 was available on my blog. Earlier int he semester we learned HTML coding which became very useful this week! A couple times, when i previewed my post the mp3 player was not present. FRUSTRATING!!!! But then I figured out that I was missing a forward slash and the file name was not capitalized! Simple things most of us would overlook! At least the problems were minor! While preparing this assignment I had an idea. Ag teachers are constantly training teams for contests. Creating recordings of oral reasons would be a great study tool for these students. Almost ALL students have an mp3 player and could learn to give reasons by simply listening to old sets. They could even take notes on the format and similarities and differences between the different files in order to create a format for them to follow. Also, if you added a visual component, you could recorded classes and create promotional videos for your FFA chapter! If you would like instructions on how I completed this assignment please leave a comment and I would be glad to share!

Instructional Website

School work is coming to a close. Recently for ETEc 5213 we were asked to create an instructional website and publish it to our UA Server. This website needed to have at least 3 instructional pages plus a homepage and an author page.

My website was a basic step by step approach to completing a promotional video for agriculture.

Dreaweaver is a great program for learning to build websites. It offers many troubleshooting tips as well as tutorials. The website I created was very basic and given more time and a little more experience could be altered to be very applicable in a classroom. the menu bar is created by using a Spry bar menu which was much easier than creating a "nice" menu by myself. It comes prepared to link to other pages and is esaily changed to other colors. The first time I used the menu the links did not work correctly but I deleted the menu and retried and the next one worked fine.

I would like to spend some time to create a photo album to add to the webpage for stick photos for students to access to use in their videos.

Shutterfly Christmas Cards

Oh Gosh....Its Christmas time! I still have so much to do. Decorate, FINISH CLASSES, Take Finals, and send out Christmas cards! Christmas cards are a great way to connect with family near and far. Its always better if those cards are personalized. This year, consider using Shutterfly.

Shutterfly in running a promotion to get 50 christmas cards free for promoting their site on your blog!

Simply visit shutterfly.com and fill out the form.

Until next time,
Have a great Thanksgiving and BLACK Friday!

Dreamweaver

Hello Blog World,
Class the past few weeks has been really busy and I am ready for the end of the semester. In Introduction to Education Media, we have been working with HTML and CSS for a while now, as I discussed in a previous post. Now, we have began working with Adobe Dreamweaver to create webpages. Compared to coding it all by hand, Dreamweaver is a God send! This software allows the creater to work from the design view. Being a visual/kinesthetic learner, I was able to pick this up much faster than before.
I had some trouble getting started but once I figured out a few tools, the rest was a breeze. Any trouble I had, I was able to watch tutorials and read step by step directions. This software is really easy to use and by having the basic knowledge of HTML coding it makes a lot of sense. I have said this numerous times and will probably say it again before the end of the semester...I AM NOT CREATIVE. I believe the point of a webpage is to catch a cutomer/person of interests eye and hold their attention. I am not creative enough to do that. I created a very basic webpage and really don't know what to do to "spice it up". Webpages are important and can be a great tool for managing extracurricular activities such as the ones in FFA. Maybe I will have really creative students that can help me out!

Until next time,
KMP

Photoshop

Moving on from HTML/CSS, we have started Photoshop. Photoshop has many features and offers the ability to change photos with ease. I am not a super creative person but can handle making some changes. In the photos below you will see a wedding pictures as it was taken. Then there is the photo that has been edited. I took the color out (turned it to black and white) then re added the color of my flowers.

I also used Photoshop to change the effect on an image. The change made in the after picture was achieved by implementing a painting filter. This added "brush strokes" to the image. I could make the brush strokes small or large. I choose to leave the brush strokes small, in order to not distort the image.

Since Photoshop is utilized by so many people, there are many tutorials available as well as forums explaining how to accomplish different effects. Like I said earlier in the post, I am not a super creative person but was able to utilize tools in the program to make minor changes to images. For this assignment I was required to use a picture of myself, so maybe it would have been more fun if I could have used someone/something else as the subject in the photos.

In teaching, especially Agricultural Education, we document many things through photographs (team achievements, banquets, chapter meetings, etc), Photoshop could be utilized to make those snapshots into great photos to display.

Until next time,

Kristin

Need Motivation

Week 7 of the semester is now half over. I can not get motivated this semester for the life of me. I need something to push me to do better and it is just not happening. Hoepfully it will get better. I really just want to be teaching. :(