LAST DAY! Motion Picture Camp Signoff!

Today, the classes were split up. Down in the basement with Chris and Paul and AJ, students who hadn't finished their projects (or had discovered problems after rendering the day before) had the opportunity to completely finished them.

In room 1221, Tony showed the final videos to everyone who had already completed their projects. Everyone laughed and enjoyed the fruits of their labors. And then, the class celebrated by watching an Alfred Hitchcock Film, Rear Window, taking notes on the cinematography and story line. Students trickled in from the other room as they completed their projects.

After discussing the movie upon its completion, the class went on break and got lunch until it was time to leave for the Summer Recognition Program at Memorial Union. Though Tony had quite a time keeping things relatively orderly, the day was fun and laid back, a perfect end to Motion Picture Camp!

FULL DAY! Motion Picture Camp - the home stretch!

First full day of ITA labs all summer! The day began by showing a few example movies - Tony and Paul showed AJ's Totally Nutzoid Girl and asked the students to point out specific features of the movie they thought they could utilize.

Next, the students entered into a long session of Project Studio Time. Erica and Saige spent a good long time editing, being almost finished with their videos; Ma kept faithfully working on her really good music/dance video. The Zombie movie of Dylan, Itzel, Lucy, Clara, and Aubrey kept getting better and better (and shorter and shorter as they cut out unnecessary clips to make their horror film more exciting), Collin's group got a lot of help from Tony and Jele, Patrick, Nick, and Illa filmed a new scene and continued editing.

At 11:30, Elizabeth brought the class together to take the permit test. There was still a lot of 'work time' energy, but everyone managed to stay relatively quiet the whole time.

After a wonderful Chipotle lunch, the class reconvened to finish up their projects. Aubrey and Dylan went to overdub, the final part of their movie production. Collin's group completely finished. Erica and Saige also had a bit of overdubbing to do and then were finished too. Jele's group completely finished with Tony's help. And Ma and Elizabeth finished up her dance video. Wow, great job everyone!

The day ended with the road test.

Day 8: Star Wars and Project Studio Time

Tony began the day by watching some of his favorite clips from fail.com. Afterwards, Elizabeth shared a movie she's been working on that incorporates many special effects. She asked the class to watch out for:

• Sin City Affect
• Ghost Effect
• Floating Objects
• Light Sabers
• Fast/Slow Motion

Afterwards, work time began and Elizabeth showed a few students who were interested how to do these effects. The rest of the class continued with their projects - by the end of the day, many people were getting ready to do overdubbing tomorrow! Projects need to be completed by the end of the day tomorrow!

Day 7: Sound Design

The day began as Tony gave a presentation on sound design. The class talked about various youtube videos, including a really funny cat who was very confused about what a printer is . . . the video had added sound effects to make it more dramatic.

Tony then introduced freesound.org and explained how you can preview and download any sound from the site. As Tony was explaining, Remmy, Oscar and Nick all suddenly jerked back pulling at their headphones; they had previewed a high pitched screeching noise entitled something rather inappropriate for this blog and found it to be rather startling!

Tony led the class in a sound design challenge with the Purple Rain video. They were supposed to overdub a scene using their in class computers microphone. Each student was soon busily planning what to say, recording, and adding music and sound effects. Different students took different approaches - Dylan did a more realistic to the actually filming whereas Ma tried to figure out how to overdub in Hmong.

Afterwards, Tony let the class loose to work on their projects! More to follow tomorrow!

And a new week commences!

Day 6 of Motion Picture Camp has begun! Today the class listened as Tony and AJ explained the basics of film editing in Vegas. They went over:

• splitting
• titles
• speeding/slowing
• ungrouping and regrouping
• reversing
• video effects
• audio effects (especially reverb and pitch shift)
• putting in images from photoshop and using them as titles in Vegas
• Downloading fonts at dafont.com

The rest of the afternoon, Project Studio Time! Different groups split off in different directions, some filming, others scriptwriting, and the majority editing. Ma's doing a music video by herself, Erica and Saige are working together, and Clara, Lucy, Itzel, Aubrey, and Dylan are working together - everyone but Dylan went to film their music video. Dylan worked on a fun stop animation film he did at home and edited.

See Dylan's stop animation here! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP3LGIJO8EY

Another great day, complete!

Music Video Day!

Today we started by watching the movies from the Blitz. Everyone did a great job, as expected, and the discussion afterward raised some good points about some of the things that the students are going to have to think about in regards to the final projects. One point is acting--it's not a good thing when an actor is smiling when he's supposed to be serious. Also, there were some technical issues with some of the films, but other than that, everything looked and sounded great!

Once that was finished, the class broke up into groups for filming music videos. The first hurdle in handling that for a lot of the groups was deciding what song to use. With five or six people in a group, it was hard for everyone to come to an agreement about what music would be best. In the end, though, the groups knuckled down and got to work, going off to film wherever they could. Some went outside, exploring the campus, while others used the halls and labs for their settings.

Tomorrow is the second day for working on these videos, and they're going to be awesome!!!

Blitz!!!

Today was the Blitz, and all of the students did very well. It's no easy task, putting together and entire movie from start to finish, but everyone went right to work and had a lot of fun doing it. The theme this year was "perspectives," and it was something that seemed to hit a chord with a lot of the students. They did films on differences between races, ages, sexes, and even points of view.

All in all, great work, class of 2013, and thanks for making this year's blitz one of the best we've had!

Why 2013 is the best class EVER

This morning as I was greeting the students who came in to the lab, we were chatting about how much school they have left this year. I told them that I remember last summer when they were fresh out of middle school and still a little uncertain (even if they were pretending not to be) about heading off to high school and about what being in ITA would be like. But now, they have done their Many Uses of Computers camp last summer, so they can identify parts of a computer and they can make power point presentations; they have had a graphics design unit, either in Illustrator or Photoshop, so they can create and manipulate images for electronic media; and they have had a semester of web design, so they are familiar with html code and css design. They know a lot! They also have a lot of useful, hands-on, personal experience using software that most high school students their age are probably not even aware of. They are visibly more confident and relaxed (and taller) than they were last summer. I am impressed with them. They have worked hard all year and it has been a pleasure to be their instructor.

Today we started the day with a few minutes to finish up some things they need to fix for their Behind the Wheel project. AJ had evaluated their projects and saved some comment sheets for each team. They got right to work. Then they had 25 minutes to do a road test where they were required to build a  website when they were given the necessary files to do so.

Then, after a short break we went upstairs to join AJ for an introduction to Vegas Video camp. AJ did a great job of getting the students excited about what they can do this summer with video camp.

AJ talked to us about ways to plan a good movie and showed us a music video he made. Then I reviewed the design principles with everyone. Then AJ had the students identify props used in his video. This allowed the students to discuss and identify various elements that make up a movie. Then students brainstormed movie ideas.

AJ did a really great job of getting the students excited about what they can do this summer with video camp.

Trying not to doze off "Behind the Wheel" on a Cold Spring Morning

(Stephanie and Jacob are making a website!)

This morning in Felipe and Eliza's room, students got off to a bit of a slow start -- maybe the frosty morning made everyone's blood a little sluggish. At 5 minutes after 9, many students still had not arrived (although Aneda was here bright and early!).

Our first activity today was to look at a spreadsheet that Felipe had made detailing each group's BTW project and which parts need work. Eliza went over the spreadsheet with the class, showing the groups that some of the sites were in good shape, while others were still looking illegible or missing images. Then we got right to work. Illa was popping up out of his chair a lot to talk to every one else on his team, so he had to be reminded firmly to focus on his own screen.

Aubrey, Lucy, Remi, Nick, D.J. all needed to take a CSS and HTML permit test while the others were working on their BTW.

Snapshot at 9:47 from my view at the back of the room (Eliza): Illa is working on summaries of the Friday trilogy movies, which his group as titled ITA Saturdays; Remi is focused on his permit test;  Juan is looking at his scores in Panda, but Eliza has reminded him repeatedly to concentrate on his summaries of the Toy Story movies; David is busily grafting his photo on to the head of a the Toy Story astronaut; Lucy is moving quickly through her permit test on Learn@UW; Jacob is cleaning up a graft of what looks likes Remi's head on to an X-Men poster; Aubrey is working on his permit test I can't see Aneda's screen clearly, but she seems to be working on summaries; for some reason, Collin is looking at You Tube videos (hopefully those having to do with his Blade trilogy work); DJ too is on Learn@UW taking a permit test; Stephanie is fixing html code for her site and flipping back and forth between that screen and gmail chat where she seems to be chatting with Jacob about their work (following our instructions to be quiet while others work on their permit tests); I just had to remind Jose again to focus on his summaries; Juan M. is busily editing HTML code, and Nick is working on his permit test. Full circle! Illa is still looking for a summary of the last Friday movie (with a significant sidetrack into image databases).

So far it seems that students have made significant progress.

10:06 and the room is silent, with only the sounds of clicks and keyboards (amazing).

Felipe warned the students that this really is the last day they will have time to work on their BTW in class REALLY TRULY (because sometimes we say that and it is an idle threat because we really give them them another chance). Next week the student will do introductory stuff for the summer video unit, so there really will be no time for working on the BTW.

Then we had a break and we consumed some sugary snacks  . . .

Excell stopped by to let everyone know that they need to turn in important paperwork so that they can stay in ITA. (Get that paperwork done, students! We want to see you back next year!!)

After the break, Illa asked Eliza to look at the summaries he had written for the ITA Saturday movies. He had written some amusing stories--and quite well done (although we did have to fix some mistakes with capitalization). Way to go, Illa!

(Everyone is working hard at ITA!)

Yes, in spite of a few early reminders to concentrate, after a little while the students got focused and really worked hard for the rest of the day. 

We ended the day with a Dreamweaver test and a blog.

Thanks to Felipe for great session photos!!!!

Spendin' some time behind the wheel and drivin' our html code towards a road test

This morning we started with Education hour working on the Behind the Wheel projects. Felipe had each group of three sit in order so all those working on codes were on the left side of the room and all those working on creative content were on the right side of the room. Illa was being creative by working people from ITA in to the plot of the film trilogy his team is making in to a website. Patrick was having some trouble focusing and being creative; his group has had "creative conflicts" from the beginning, but to their credit, the actual work itself is getting done.

Snapshot of a moment in time: Felipe is bent over Nick's computer, helping him adjust his html code; Juan M. is staring at his screen, busily editing code; DJ is now consulting with Felipe about something Felipe is projecting on the classroom screen; Juan A. is editing code; Stephanie is really working hard on her code editing; Jacob is cleaning up his photo edits, adding Stephanie's face from a Facebook photo; Patrick is working on turning his summaries of the Blade trilogy, which he copied from the internet, into something more creative and personal; Collin just finished adding his own head to images of the Blade movies (Patrick is refusing to allow his team to use his face since they won't let him be the character he wants to be in the movie cast); Aubrey is adding Excel's face to a Rush Hour poster; David is adding Juan's face on to a Toy Story image; Jose is working with David on editing on the Toy Story image because they decided to collaborate on the images and then collaborate on the writing; Illa is being very creative (and talkative) while re-writing the plot of the Friday movies to fit his team's "ITA Saturday" theme; Remi is working in adding Illa's face to the movie posters and (full-circle) back to Nick, who is still working on code.

Remi found a great photo of Excel when he was in high school. He has a 70's hairstyle and is in a cafeteria drinking milk. Funky! During break, everyone came in from the other classroom to take a look.

Work time continued in a similar fashion through all of Education and Exploration periods.

Then everyone got silent while each student worked on his or her html and css test on learn @ UW. Felipe watched everyone like a hawk while Elizabeth went in to the hallway to supervise Patrick while he tried to get the trouble with his net ID worked out. It seems he finally has access (yay!).

Everybody did some bloggin and then we saved our files and left to get some Thai food (yum).

Satatat Session 8 WEBBIN'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmGr4yfXBCg

Dear today,

Started off with everyone getting into their groups, and lining up by role. The coders were few -- we only had four groups, and of that Besma was in the other room and Marcie wasn't here -- but then Besma showed up and Sarai pinch hit for Marcie.

Besma's site was near done, and entirely original. Kim and Sarai quickly caught their groups up with the pre-made code, and Saige had finished typing up the HTML at home and continued to work on CSS.

Oscar rocked on the images for cheetah girls. Erica had already made a bunch of images at home.

Copy text ("copy" being publisher-speak for text/writing) was spewed out by Clara and Ibadete, who both wrote short novels for their BTWs.

Dylan rocked out in the front of the room, building his own custom site from scratch.

In the final hour, everybody took the second attempt at HTML/CSS. It was awesome. Some people complained, but jokingly.

Best,
ITA Session

Sat Number 7

Word,

In room B109, the class participated in A.J.'s Web Presentation, a fantastic display of web knowledge and review that brought a number of student's up to speed in all things web design.

A.J. presented first the general idea of building a website, then got into specifics in HTML and CSS, with usage, syntax, and purpose. Students used a worksheet to practice select topics.

After a period and a half of the assessment, the Exploration section saw a massive increase in BTW productivity. Students worked in near silence, with extreme diligence, on their BTW projects.

The last period was three fold: a Dreamweaver first permit attempt (which went quite well), then a blogging question/summary assessment of how BTWs are going, then a last 15 minutes or so on the BTWs.

In short, it was a solid ITA Saturday.

April 10 (not a day for fools)

ITA Freshmen were no fools today! Much was accomplished by all! Students worked on their BTW projects, where each team of 3 students is designing a website about a movie trilogy. Today, the coders worked closely with Felipe to get their website codes all established and working cleanly. Those students responsible for the written content and images worked on their parts, with help from both Eliza and Felipe. The teams made progress. Some students were using the built-in cameras to take photos for their websites. They were adopting facial expressions and poses that imitated the original photos and still shots from the films  . . . v-hilarious! You should have seen Juan A. looking "intense" . . . . It's cool too that the students recognize visually that a full-front facial view is different from a 3/4 facial view, and that they were wanting to create the right sorts of views so that when they added their own faces to the original image, it would look as authentic as possible.

After a break, everyone took the Dreamweaver permit test and worked on daily blogs.

All morning the class was busily engaged and working hard.

Web Unit Session 6 in b207

Today the session was a bit different for the students. They had AJ come in and do an AJ Stop-in, which was new. That took both Education and Exploration. Afterwards, they had their permit test in Certification and a blog prompt to answer. Although initially the students were told that they'd have time during Exploration to work and finish any of their previous projects and time to work on their BTW in Certification, the AJ Stop-in took more time than anticipated, so they will be left for next week, when AJ will do his thing in Kevin's room.
During Education, AJ came in to do his Stop-in. His goal was to inform and assess the students. He had a presentation that was essentially a survey of the HTML and CSS. It wasn't about what Kevin and/or Felipe had been teaching in the classrooms, it was about HTML and CSS in general, what they should know about them regardless of the instructor. He had a nice powerpoint with some cool graphics filled with awesome information (although the orange text was a little hard to read), like the differences between the types of CSS. He also heavily emphasized the terms attribute, property, and value and what is associated with each one. This seemed to help the students. AJ had a worksheet for the students to fill out as he taught. There were points in his presentation when he'd pause to have the students fill out something based on a prompt. There was also a section of the worksheet with missing HTML elements and the students had to go through and find and fix them all. This went pretty well. AJ and Felipe went around and helped the students when they raised their hands and stayed with a specific student for a little bit at a time. In general the students were able to identify and correct the broken HTML. The students took a break after AJ finished going over his presentation. After (a shortened) break, the students came back to finish the AJ Stop-in. During Exploration, AJ had a more hands-on activity, in which he had the students fix his website, because he forgot to make a page for the puppets...
After a quick demonstration by AJ, the students grabbed AJ's files off the network and began to work. They had to create a new text document, name it appropriately, and change the file type to HTML. Once they had that, they had to open up one of the pages with an editor, copy the HTML, and paste it into their newly-created puppets.html. Once the text was in there, they had to reword a few tags so it was clear the page was about puppets. During the rewording part, Stephanie went ahead and stared adding in the image. She managed to do it all on her own, calling Felipe and AJ over just to make sure she was doing it right. She added the image on her own while going ahead of everyone else. Yeah, that's the same Stephanie who, when AJ asked if she was ready in the morning, had to be given a few extra minutes to raise her hand! It was awesome. A lot of the students had similar situations--they'd call over an instructor to check to see if the work was right, and more often than not, it was. Fixing AJ's site went really well overall. The students seemed to like it to. AJ also talked about and demonstrated how to slice an image or web layout in Photoshop. He demonstrated it with his Thailand website: he had the .jpg image in Photoshop, talked about how he could do it by cropping and undoing, and then showed the students how to use the slice tool. He then talked a little about file organization, about how if you're not using a file in your website, you should delete (and did so with some unused slice images) and talked a little about Serif and Sans Serif fonts.
After the second break, the students had to take their permit test. The test didn't seem to go as well at first, but looking at reports from past classes, it seems that it went just as expected. In actuality, Felipe's class, with the AJ Stop-in, had about 10% higher scores on average than Kevin's class, who is going to be getting the AJ Stop-in next session. It seems the AJ Stop-ins work really well! The day ended with a blog prompt asking the students about their thoughts on the AJ Stop-in and on the permit test and asking for a screenshot of their puppets.html page. The general consensus from the students was positive regarding the AJ Stop-in and not so positive on the permit test.
Here's David's artifact:

In general, most of the artifacts looked like that as well, except David also changed the text for the page, which no one else did.

Next time in The Web Unit:

Students will see time to complete any previous projects they may not have completed, or may not have been satisfied with. If it becomes that a student claims to be done, they will be asked to work on a project. The HARDEST project (in their opinion). Everyone will be working on something. No. Ex. Cu. Ses. Felipe will (should) make an announcement telling the students that they will need to have a rough draft of their BTWs DONE by the end of the [April 10th] session. As students will see Spring Break before that session, No. Ex. Cu. Ses.

Tune in next time!

Day Numero 6 in B109

Hi,

Today we had a blast. First, and most of the day, we went to an online copy of the inline to external activity. Downloading it to our computers and then making that into a website, complete with images, took QUITE a bit of time.

But we did it, and it was awesome. Next, we started moving inline styles to external styles. It took quite a bit of remembering, to the point of the instructor having to go up and do the activity he demoed the past two sessions again, but we learned it. More or less.

All that business ended up taking up both the Education and Exploration sections. And, as always, students had to teach each other in order to survive the harsh climate of B109.

The last period, A.J. came in and had the students do a survey. Then, they cheerfully took a permit test, and finally, they bloggered.

Oh, speaking of A.J., that reminds me: the other classroom, B to the two 07, did A.J.'s assessment, whereas here in ol' B109, we just worked on the Inline to External activity. So next time, we're ready for the Assessment!

Adios ~

Fantastically Positioned Pages - Day 5 of WEB U

Our day blasted off with a demonstration of how positioning in CSS works. Students learned about static positioning ("browser default!" later exclaimed a student's blog), relative, absolute, and fixed. Oscar took it outside the classroom and pointed out how MySpace uses fixed positioning to keep elements of their site in the same place.



After the demonstration, students drilled down on details by following a worksheet of the same activity.

A good hour into the morning we all went upstairs for a meeting about rules. That prompted a discussion of servers upon our return. Students re-learned how special software turns a regular computer into a server, and Kevin displayed some code he wrote for a class that does just that.

The next 20 minutes or so was a lesson using Felipe's excellent website-cum-activity, inline to external styles. Kevin presented a fictitious future for the students, in which they are professional web designers asked to change the background on 500 web pages for a single website! Using inline styles, this task would take ages. With external styles, however, it takes deleting and adding one word.

For the final stretch, students worked on their BTWs. Kevin was accused of giving students' computers' viruses when the site he suggested, cameriod, wasn't working. At the end of another frantic, exciting day, groups made true progress on their BTWs, and upped their CSS wizardry skills.

Inline/External Style Sheets/Positioning, a collection of awesome stuff to learn

 

Just like this cool computer dude from : http://media.merchantcircle.com, we looked closely today----we looked closely at coding for positioning and at replacing inline styles with external style sheets.

We started off right away with a step-by-step activity on positioning in CSS. Our .html file created 4 colored boxes on the display. We changed the codes for the position of the boxes on the screen then watched how our changes affected the display.We learned that we can set the position as "relative" to the objects above and below, or that we can make it be "fixed" so that it stays at the same place on the screen. We also learned that if we don't tell the browser to set "margin: 0" that it will automatically create a white margin space around whatever we want it to display.

Then we had a meeting with all of ITA to talk about new rules regarding movement between rooms and leaving the building by 4:15 PM.

After the meeting, we began working on creating external style sheets to replace inline display of styles. This activity was challenging for many of the students, although Juan M., Juan A., DJ and Aubrey seemed to catch on fairly quickly.

We were relieved to take a brief break and then everyone got into BTW groups to work on organizing the files in the network drive. Students also took a few minutes to blog.

WEBBER DAY FOUR

The Web Unit Day 4 saw an unprecedented level of confusion... And thus LEARNING! No, in actuality students did make their grievances known. They were tired of feeling like they didn't know what they were doing, and we tried to argue that's how they're supposed to feel. (To a degree...)

Let's look at what happened:

First, Kevin led the class in a recreation of a professor's site:



The basics of setting up a site in Dreamweaver, using its interface for all sorts of regular HTML tasks: making links, lists, linking style sheets, and so on.

The students then broke the usual haze of Education section by fireing up Dreamweaver and following the steps Kevin went through. They also had access to a step by step set of instructions on a Google doc, that had one crucial error: the steps didn't have numbers! They were in paragraphs!

Tony and Kevin went around reading aloud the instructions whenever students had trouble, or clarified what they meant.

After the Education Section, students entered the full fledged Exploration section, doing the same thing. Kevin would demo in front of the class how to do something (say, add a CSS rule to a div's id), and then students would have at it themselves, using the hard to read directions. A cadre of talented students, Oscar, Besma, Natalia included, managed to come near finished!

Oscar's site:



Finally, students got back to work on their parody site. Not a crazy amount of progress is being made, but definitely some. Shrek had a funny edit of Illa, and a number of students were taking their photos with cameriod.com!

February 20: Catching the Dream with Dreamweaver

We all woke up to see fresh snow on the ground, and even though we were sleepy we came to ITA with a spring in our steps (even if it isn't quite yet spring outside).

The first thing we did was to look at how to link CSS sheets and how to build them in Dreamweaver. Eliza did the demo while Felipe described what she was doing. It gets a bit complicated to use CSS, but the results are pretty cool because it affects the entire site all at once so that you don't have to type in the styles for every single page. We can't wait to start really building our own pages!

Felipe then did a walk through of in-line coding and how to change it to CSS coding. It seems complicated, but maybe after building a CSS sheet today, students will be able to do it next time.

After a well-deserved and much-needed break, the fantabulous students began following the steps in the worksheet to make their own version of a website about Professors Against Bad Romance Novels (bad romance novels are just, well, bad!). Students were engaged in the process, but found it difficult from the get-go. The first problem is that the network is accursedly slow, so downloading the necessary folders from the network drive wasted time. Perhaps in the future we might do something similar to what STS does and make several jump drives from which the students can copy files? The second difficult part was that Windows 7 doesn't want to interface properly with Dreamweaver CS3, so each little step of defining the site was difficult for students. Once they got that done though, they started making quick progress through the steps. Although this activity was very challenging, the students stuck with it, but it was hard enough that they didn't have time to do all of it in the 50 minutes before break.

After our second break, Felipe instructed students to save a screen shot of their work on the webpage and upload it to blogger, then join their BTW teams to keep working in their projects. It was a good idea to upload their screen shots before working with their teams because they probably won't be at the same computer later, but they will be able to access their blogger site from anywhere and continue to work on their blogs. Way to go!

Then students broke up in to their groups to work on their projects. The were working with a lot of focus and making progress. Illa was working on cropping a photo of Remi to put on their site, Stephanie was writing the copy for hers and Jacob's site, and Aneda was also working on writing for her group's spoof of Rush Hour. I totally can't wait to see what they come up with!

For the last few minutes, everybody blogged and the day was wondrously successful!

Web Unit Day 3

The class commenced with an interactive demonstration of how to define a site. Clara volunteered to come up to the front of the class and explain how to set up a site and index folder for use in Dreamweaver using physical folders.

Kevin then led the students through the Dreamweaver Lesson. He quickly made a 4-page website for the IAPABRN (International Association of Professors Against Bad Romance Novels). Oscar was amazed at how quickly somebody can make a functioning website. Kevin introduced the Daily Puzzle which didn't puzzle Oscar and Sophia.

After break, the Exploration Section came in with full force! The students started working on making the "Cloud, Sky, Ground" website. The directions weren't the best.... so students had to do some learning on the fly. The adventure list was far too ambitious, and most students didn't get far at all, except for Oscar, who finished the entire activity!

For certification, students began gathering images for their parody websites. Most seemed to enjoy imagining themselves as gorgeous, photoshopped movie stars. Finally, students blogged about

Ultimately, the day scored a 6 on the productivity scale, and a 9 on the fun scale, with the former being caused by the instructors, and the latter by the students.

Weaving Dreams

Eliza led our first activity, which was a short lesson on correctly setting up folders on the computer. She used real-life folders to demonstrate. There was one folder labeled "Think like a computer". Inside that folder was one called "index.html". The index folder held a piece of paper that looked like a website might look, but with spaces for the images. In the spaces for the images, there were post-it notes that read "show jellyfish.jpg in images folder" and "show babyclown.jpg". There was a second file folder inside the main one that was labeled "images" and in that folder was a photo of a jellyfish. Illa came to the front of the room and showed the class what was in the folders and how easy it was to locate the jellyfish picture, but it was impossible to find the baby clown picture. The idea was that if we don't tell the computer where to find the images, then it won't be able to display them on the screen.

Then we did the daily puzzle. Today's puzzle was called "scour the code" because the goal was to look carefully at the code and repair it. Collin was the first to figure the puzzle out . . . answer: none of the tags had been closed!

The next activity went very well. Eliza demonstrated on the computer while Felipe explained what she was doing. We learned how to use the design view in Dreamweaver to set up div tags and to change styles from paragraphs to headings. We also learned how to make an internal link and how to add images to the design.

Felipe then explained today's "adventure list" and we took a break.

Today's "adventure list" was very challenging. Most students seemed to have a difficult time completing all the tasks. They seemed to have a hard time making the size for the div tags, which required them to use css, and then making a list, which required them to make a nested list. Eventually Felipe did a few more brief demonstrations which answered some of the overall questions and then students were able to keep working. David was able to get his done and then it seemed like a few other students started to understand better and finish theirs.

After another short break, we began working on our BTW. Each group has chosen a trilogy to make a website about. For each website there are three roles: 1. coder, 2. image master, 3. text writer and editor. Each student will do part of the work for the overall website. Eliza showed Stephanie, Jacob and Marcy how to make a drop box folder so they could collaborate on their files and work on them at home.

Web Unit Session 2 - 1/23/10

Heee-yah!

The Web Unit! Day Dos:

The morning started out with the CSS Switcheroo activity. The students observed the differences in CSS in their page while learning how to apply external CSS sheets. Several students were able to articulate what was changing (the layout, colors, and styles) and what wasn't (the content inside the HTML page).

Next Kevin formally introduced CSS, with a rousing lecture that put only two students to sleep. They learned how to style up a basic website from 10,000 feet, seeing some of the tags but not using them themselves.

The Exploration section was kicked off with Tony showing Hey Monday's (band) website's firebug and explaining why you'd use firebug. Next, students jumped into what has heretofore been known as a "To Do List" but will hence forth be known as an "Adventure List", at the request of several students.

The students took an existing HTML page and added their own background images, colors, and styles by attaching a CSS sheet. They weren't given the syntax, but rather forged their web pages with a combination of remembrance and w3school googling. Excellent initiative all around, but things did get a bit carried away (as will be covered by the two points Kevin lost).

Kevin gained his first point of the day by proving Saige wrong on something (we started keeping track on the white board), then subsequently lost it when he forgot to have students save their work up until just 5 minutes before break. They then had to work through the break, which they did cheerfully. Apparently, they really enjoyed styling up their sites.

The day passed straight on into Certification, when students had to break up into groups of three for their BTWs. A group of four students requested to become a group of four BTW students, and Kevin had to say "three" in four languages before they gave up. (English: "three", Spanish: "tres", Arabic: "ثلاثة", and Albanian: "tre". Kevin did not know these languages before, but picked them up fluently and with impressive alacrity once the students started conversing freely.)

Now in groups of three (and one of two, and another of two but possessing a rain check from the absent Marze), students chose trilogy movies they would make parody sites about. Groups dallied significantly in selection, with conversations being fiercely and academically debated with rigor and exceptional rhetoric. At one point, a group even rock-paper-scissored for the honor of mocking Shrek.

Kevin lost his last point when he recalled, 5 minutes before the end of the day, that the blog question had yet to be tackled. Besma point this out, and, having been the observer of the first error, had two points written up on the board.

Miraculously, most students had already finished theirs earlier during the missed break, and serendipity prevailed.

All and all, absolute blast of an ITA Saturday.

Felipe and Eliza explore the POWER of CSS (Web Unit Day Two)

We started with a daily puzzle. Students opened an HTML file and applied several different CSS files to see how the files changed the look of the website. It seemed to be a good way for the students to see how the CSS changed the whole site. The students seemed to understand fairly quickly.

During the Education part of the day, Felipe demonstrated CSS code and talked about how it works and how to apply it to an HTML page. Some students had questions as they watched the demonstration. They wanted to know if CSS always had to be done externally or if you could do it inside the HTML document.

After a brief break, we started on our To Do list for the day:

1. Grab the ToDo Folder


2. Create a blank CSS sheet


3. Link or import it to the HTML document


4. Add a repeating background image using CSS


5. Apply a margin to the body or center the page


6. Replace picture of the cow with another image


7. Style the body, h1, h2, p, ul, and a tags.


8. Artifact: take a screen shot of your web page for your blog

This To Do list seemed to be more difficult than the list last week, and most students had trouble working with it. Students didn't know to make sure all their files were saved in the same folder so that Dreamweaver could work with them. Also, Stephanie had the style name spelled wrong, so the background color wouldn't work. David figured it out quickly and so did Lucy.

After break, students got in to groups of three to begin working on their Behind the Wheel project. For the project, students choose a movie trilogy to make a parody website. Each student in the group will have individual responsibilities that reflect the types of roles professional web designers might have when working on a team to make a website. One student will do all the work for the visuals and images, another student will be the writer/editor of all the content, and one student will be responsible for all the coding.

Today, students chose their groups and then decided together which trilogy to work on. Then they began to design a simple layout for their webpage.

Blastoff

The WEB UNIT! Our room kicked off with Kevin finishing the daily puzzle right up to the last minute (8:59am), allowing students to submit answers to form questions they found buried in HTML comments and w3schools.

Next, a lecture on the Internet and HTML, where students took notes on a shared google doc. At the end a pop quiz ensued, with students proving they had sucked up everything like sponges. Clarifying questions were asked!

After break, 2013 showed their true colors by blasting through a checklist of HTML coding tasks. With only a hand-waving introduction to the very basics of the basic bare-bones, 2013ers used their burly minds to look up tags, fonts, and colors, whatever it was that they wanted for their first ever HTML page.

After break number two, students finished up taking a print screen of their pages, then even remembered that we needed to transfer the pages off desktops and onto the network in order to save them for good. Tony and Kevin then showed their BTW examples, getting laughs at fake quotes from movie critique Excel Williams.

And So We Begin and the Web Unit Shall Be Fantabulous!

Web Rompin' With Felipe and Eliza

We started the day with a daily puzzle. Students looked at a simple website and used "control + u" to reveal the html code. Then they read the comments within the code to answer the questions on the website. Some of them had trouble at first figuring out how the code links up with what they see on the screen, but they figured it out fairly quickly. Then we had a brief lesson about what html code is and how the internet works. We looked at today's To Do list and then took a brief break. (The Madison area High Schools are currently in basketball playoffs, so that was the topic of break time conversation in our room!)

As students worked on the To Do list, they started understanding both the code itself and how careful you have to be so that the code will actually work. Juan A. and Oscar had trouble at first because although they had the code right, they had it in the wrong order. They were putting a paragraph tag before every sentence and then not closing the paragraph tag. So, once they fixed that, they could see that it worked.

Many students finished the list quickly and they all seemed to be enjoying the activity. They were more than enthusiastic about it! Several of them wanted to learn right away how to add colors and font styles to the webpage they were creating. They asked the question and they did their own online research to find out how to do what they wanted to do. They even started linking videos to their page.

It was thrilling to teach them, to see them get excited about what they could do with code. Jose wanted to add more colors than basic red and blue, so he found a website that showed him the codes for a lot of colors. You should have seen these amazing students! They were moving to each other's computers to help each other, to show each other something new they had learned. The lab was full of a really awesome electric learning energy of enthusiasm! I heard one student say "Oh my gosh, this is cool!" when he opened his file with a web browser. The students went way beyond the To Do list. This was really the best ITA session I have seen and it was exactly what I always hope the students will do. Illa said, when he came back from break "This unit is the best one so far!".

Then we blogged and learned about the BTW for this unit.

AWESOME!!






Illa's HTML code and webpage

2013 Photoshop End of Semester Recap

Overall this Photoshop Unit semester with the class of 2013 went great! The students got to learn a great amount of how to use Photoshop and many of them really caught on quick and were able to make some impressive projects throughout the Unit.

The Unit ended with a nice end-of-the-semester presentation of all the projects the students from the class of 2013 did while progressing in their world of "Photoshopism." The presentation did a great job of showing how much the students, as well as the instructors, had accomplished this semester. And knowing how much some of them really got into it, it will be interesting to see what other magnificent projects they go on to create as they continue to learn and explore all of the many, many possibilities of Adobe Photoshop.