Skills Update E - Graphic Skills

I have some beginning experience with graphic skills as I have learned a little about Photoshop and InDesign in my previous job.  I am not proficient however and can always improve my skills in this area.  Today, I have spent the afternoon working on a poster advertisement for a family owned business in VA.  I thought I would create something they could use to advertise their music classes.  I made the background to look like their puppet stage and then added little icons of their puppets.  I learned how to group and ungroup layers and made the name and puppet as one layer so that when I move it, they move together.  I like that feature and did not know about that before!  Also, today I learned how to wrap the text around the picture which I did with the names, "Gigi" and "Wolfgang".  I also added the shapes with text inside, and then placed the logo and name together.  Overall, I'm pleased with how this project turned out and hope they can use it in their program, and I touched on the few skills I needed to learn in my boot camp assignment.

I'll attach my final poster once I get it finished up - need to add a few details.

Skills Update D - Database Skills

Okay, I have never used Microsoft Access before today.  I watched a tutorial on how to use some of the basics and just got started.  I decided to create a different database then what I put in my boot camp paper at the beginning of the course.  I wanted to do something that would tie into an elementary classroom rather than just something to merge with my newsletter.  After doing some researching and learning more about what databases could do, I decided to make a database about the 50 states and have each field be a different feature of the states - capitals, area, population, date entered the union.  I thought it would be fun for a class to sort the states so that you could see how the states rank in different fields.

50 States Database in Word

50 States Ranked by Population

Skills Update C - Completed

Today I completed my PowerPoint presentation for a third grade unit on Australia.  I worked on changing the backgrounds, colors and adding bullets.  Bullets were the same as in word processing so that was not difficult.  It had been a long time since I had worked with PowerPoint but it was pretty easy to get the hang of it once getting into it again. 

I really enjoyed completing this practice.  I think students would enjoy using this tool as well.  They would especially enjoy the transitions, animation and colors.  The project I completed would be an example project that I used when completing a unit on Australia.  I used to have the students create a book in which each page of the book discussed something about Australia that we had learned - geography, holidays, food, home life, language and sports.  In the end, they had a nice book about Australia.  I like the update to using technology for a similar project!

I am still working on how to post my PowerPoint here.  I will do that when I figure it out!!

Update:  Here is my PowerPoint now on GoogleDocs presentation.  In importing this, it lost some of the animation and transitions.  I put them back on using the ones available but the choices were limited.

Also, here is my updated Skills Checklist as well.

Skills Update C

I have started to work on my Power Point skills for this module.  I have to admit that once I opened Power Point it quickly began to come back to me.  I have worked tonight to create a slideshow on Australia - one of the social studies units I taught as a third grade teacher and a place I would love to visit one day.  I worked tonight on creating new slides, using transitions, adding images, changing colors, and animation.  Tomorrow I will finish up this presentation and look at bullets and changing background colors.