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.

Hocus Pocus, Illustrator FOCUS

We started right in polishing up some older projects and finishing up our BTW. Even though everybody came in a bit sleepy and draggy (and not IN to the whole SNOW thing), it didn't take long for us to get warmed up and in the spirit of things.

Juan came in with most of his work already done! We gave him some comments to push him a bit further and he started working on making his polished project a bit more "polished"--so that the objects looked integrated within the images. Patrick had two different versions of his BTW website, and when he was comparing the two, he was able to decide right away that one looked better than the other because it was more simple and easier to understand. Nandi was really working hard not to give in to the initial frustration that she feels when starting a project, and she is learning to push through it and trust that she can create awesome work. Everyone else was working very hard to finish their Behind the Wheel project.

We then took our Road Test--it was fun to watch the student's progress and it will be interesting to see the results.

Werwolf Bar Mitzva! Illustrator becomes an adult!

As Tracy Jordan sings in the popular TV show 30 Rock, "Werwolf Barmitzva! Spooky, Scary!"

It's "Spooky Scary" how GREAT all the Freshmen in Chou and Eliza's class are! And they proved it today by having a wonderful and productive session.

We started off the morning with an AWESOME Illustrator Jeopardy that helped us review for our permit test (Yay!). There were some questions that NOBODY knew, but we did know a lot of them. (Yay for us!) Then we watched a You Tube video of how to make an illustrator image that looks as real as a photograph. Can you believe it? Amazing!! It must take HOURS!.

Then, after our break, we had some work time to polish up a former project and to work on the BTW. Everyone was hard at work and it seemed like everyone remembered most of the tools and was feeling comfortable with using the program. AJ showed his fantastic BTW project and everyone was impressed.

We spent the rest of the class period just working on our BTW projects, on finishing some projects to display at the Holiday Luncheon and on our permit test.

Session 5 - Photoshop (Chris/Ryan)

Much of what we want to do with the rest of the Photoshop unit is to keep the interest of the students by having them tell us what they want to learn within this application. Our Day 5 quiz addresses these concerns by asking for the student input.

Unfortunately, at 9am....students only want to input themselves back into bed. We did not receive much input from the students, but I'm hoping that we get some e-mail responses from them to help us direct the course in the future.

The students are starting to work on the web layout for their Behind the Wheel. Students are also trying to polish some of the previous in-class homework assignments. There is no real development at this time because many of the students were just starting to work on their projects. As of now, the students seem to be receptive to the project assignment...seemingly more to the actual design of the website versus polishing pre-existing assignments, which is interesting considering the web design is easily the more difficult portion.

Chou and Eliza's Class: Where the Wild ThANgs Are

Everyone came in all ready to go and we hit the Learn@UW quiz right off the bat. Chou helped us do a review of what we have learned to do with Illustrator. Some of the students came up to demonstrate how to do things. Besma was right on it with the "text on a path". She showed us what to do and Chou narrated her actions so everyone could review together. Cool!!

Eliza started a free draw lesson about point of view. The goal was to see how different the same picture can look different from two different points of view, for example the difference between a ant looking at a cookie and a person looking down on a cookie near his feet.

Theme and Variation is the focus point for the art concept that the class went over. We looked at many examples of images that had a repeated visual theme but where variations were used by changed the size, color or position to create an interesting image.

Then everyone thought about a super power they would like to have and they worked on making an image that would illustrate that super power (while also keeping in mind the idea of theme and variation).

Juan's "Absorbing Power"






Aubrey's power: to lift a garbage truck with his mind

Nandi: Superwoman on the moon (and black hole in space)

After break we looked at some of the images to see what everyone came up with, we did a critique and then we worked on the Behind the Wheel project.

Clara has a good start with her web design:

And Patrick too: