Day 3

Today was a very productive one for me as I spent much of the day developing a Prezi. Initially I couldn't quite get the software to work for me, but after watching the 5 minute tutorial on youtube, it was enough information for me to get started. I decided to develop the lesson on poster design for my 8th grade Digital Art class. I first converted the two powerpoints I had to PDFs and then imported the PDFs into Prezi. They converted the slides into images but since each slide had black backgrounds, I had to edit them to eliminate the extra space. In hindsight, it would have been best if I had a file of the images separate from the powerpoint so I didn't have to do so much editing. After that, I added text and experimented with the frames, color choices & fonts. I was a bit disappointed to discover there were only 8-10 fonts but Amy made a great point adding that they probably offer more fonts with the paid version of the program. Once I had all my images and text together, I had to complete the paths. Since I had so many images on the canvas, it took me a while to make sure that I hit each image with a path.

I was pretty pleased with the results, but when I came home to review my work, and decided to take another look at the Prezi examples from the website, I realized that many of the Prezis there zoom in and out during the presentation. For instance, they take one small area of a larger image, zoom into that part, and consequently, zoom back out into the same spot, rather than dancing around from one image to the next. I wondered if that was a result of my lack of knowledge of the software, or if again, that might be something that is possible with the more advanced, paid version. I also noticed that a lot of the Prezis on the site spin images around on their sides as they zoom in. While it seems really dynamic, I didn't spin any of my images because I felt it might be too distracting and perhaps even nauseating to the viewer. As it is I have about 18-19 paths, so there's a lot of moving around about my canvas.

As I continue to think about my presentation, the next steps I'd like to take is to create a Jing using some of the Illustrator/Photoshop skills that the students will need to employ to design their posters. I had wondered if it's possible to create the Jing and then import it into Prezi? I'm not sure if Prezi supports flash files such as Jing. I will have to experiment with that tomorrow. Also, in terms of the Jing itself, I became aware of the fact that I really need to pare down which skills I'm going to demonstrate on the screencast. There is so much I cover in both Illustrator & Photoshop, but considering that the time of year of this project is late October, the students are all really new to both programs. The poster project arises out of a request from a colleague to have the students design posters, advertising for the Middle School play. The play is always in late October, and although they're just learning Illustrator at that point, they need a few Photoshop skills to get the effects they want to create. For instance, many of them want to import images into their posters but quickly learn that in Illustrator, they cannot eliminate a background color of that image or select or crop it in any way without the use of Photoshop. This usually throws the students through a loop since most have never even opened Photoshop before. I see this as a great opportunity to create a tutorial of how to edit an image quickly in Photoshop, save it as a PNG, making it transparent, and then importing it back into Illustrator for their use. By doing this, I could place the tutorial/screencast on the server for all students to access when they reach that point within their work.

Lastly I need to also create a voicethread for the student work as a place for students to comment and reflect upon each other's work. Likewise, I need to develop my rubric further to reflect the student's responsibility for uploading images and commenting on voicethread. One last thought....I'm interested in exploring posterous.com as a means for blogging and camtasia as an alternative to Jing.