Gregory Shmegory

Have not written for a while. Must make more of a point to do so. We're now just about half way through the semester.

About half the class showed up on this fall break week. I met with everyone here and they worked on their animal illustrations. We reviewed the direct selection tool, pathfinder, transform and rotate, wrinkle.

Students are mostly doing well with this exercise. Monday will be a work day again. Wednesday, part one of this project is due.

Near the end of the semester, we need to do ...
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After a somewhat brief review of masks and selection tools, the students worked on combining two images from Little Grassy Lake, trying to make everything look in focus. In one image, the foreground was in focus, in another, the background. Many students had trouble with this. A few seemed comfortable. They'll have time on Monday to finish, but this may be too hard for many of them. We'll see about pushing through or making a modification. The assignment requires focus, some planning, lots of...
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Back to class after 1 week due to labor day holiday. Was quite happy with almost all of the grid assignments. Some were surprisingly good. The students seem to be getting comfortable with Photoshop. We reviewed all the grid projects with me displaying them on their monitors. Several of them needed minor changes and there were a few that were less than acceptable, but those were in the minority.

We spent most of the rest of class going over some selection tools we've used and some new ones, al...
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Overall, the students are doing great work. They already created a second collage, this time using their own images. Very interesting and varied results. They also wrote one-page reflections on their process, and most of them feel like they are learning a lot, enjoying the mostly new digital art world and though frustrated at times, they keep learning new things and getting past their difficulties. We spent about half of day 4 sharing the computer screen and reviewing their collages. Most peo...
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Another good day. Looks like we are down to 18 students. Got through several more tools and options. Introduced Bridge and the .pdf creator. No one, No one! knew what a .pdf was or what it stands for--scary--we've got seniors and juniors in the class. We got the Flickr group going, with everyone submitting something and commenting. We visited Eric in the basement of Allyn and they got introduced to the cameras. They need to watch my new screencasts and bring their work and/or take photos to w...
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Day 1 went really well. I started out by walking up to each student and personally introducing myself, getting their name and giving them the survey and page 1 of the syllabus. I liked that immediate personal connection and the students seemed to respond well. We blasted through the syllabus and keynote presentation via the website and the issuu version of the syllabus .pdf file. Students seemed to pay attention quite well. Everyone got to the server, though one needed the help of an IT stude...
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Post your exercise 1 .jpg as a comment to this post.

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Let's see if we can get this working with comments

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