Reflection on My audio project

I am really psyched that the audio project went so smoothly.   I used Audacity to record my audio  this time instead of using another recorder from windows 8 and then editing it with audacity. I saved it as an MP3.  It was easy to upload it to my comp file this time.  I had some difficulty getting the other files to upload.  I tried about 6 times.  Then I rebooted my computer and it worked the first time.  Not sure what was going on but it resolved its self. I am really excited to be able to put the audio on my blog now.  Is it possible to make a whole play list of MP3 files?  That would be ultra cool.  I think that the audio player would be great for giving short lectures or instructions  for students on a blog or glogster.    I think that it would be cool to have an audio/video player so that I could record lectures and place them on the blog.  I am sure that the process would be similar.
This assignment was great for getting back some of my self confidence.  I did have to adjust the permissions a couple of times but eventually got the right combination to get it to work.

My Audio project

"Fear" before

"Fear" after

Flying High before

Flying High   After

Before and after walking in my town pictures

something plastic.  plastic tops and windshields on buggies

buggies at sunset

something red  see safety triangle

no red

soft flower petals

embossed and engraved

 I enjoyed editing these photos.

Word Accessibility Project

Word Accessibility Project

    Screen readers are vital for people who have low vision.  They open up the world of research and literature as well as entertainment.  In 2007 I lost 90 % of my vision.  As an avid reader, I missed the written words very much.  When I was given Zoom Text, it opened my world back up again. 

    I currently read most things on my Ipad because I have screen reader capability and have an app called Read2go, which provides me with accessible print materials.  I enjoyed doing this project because I have low vision and on days when my vision is bad, use screen readers.  This is important to me because so many people depend on screen readers. 

     However, I was unable to locate the grading Rubric for this project and am not sure that I hit all the high points.  I used the guidelines to go through my article and correct it.  I hope that I did it correctly.
  I used the styles for headings and subheadings and normal type.  I set all those to Verdana in different font sizes so that it would be sans serif and I personally find Verdana easy to read.  I used the bullets and numbering to make lists and used ALT text to explain the pictures.  The ALT text was the most complicated and I googled it to get a quick explanation.  It really wasn't all that hard after all.  i am excited that I learned how to set the styles and to do the ALT text for the photos.  This is going to enable me to make accessible documents in the future  for attendees at conferences and for my friends that are blind.  
 i think that it is cool that you can make accessible tables as well.

Reflection on the Hearing Voices quest 

I had no trouble making recording my speech or making the MP3.   I actually enjoyed this process.  I was able to put the file onto the comp file on the UARK website.  However, After making the RSS feed, I was unable to get this to launch onto the web.  I spent many frustrating days repeating the steps over and over but kept getting an error message.  This is something that I am interested in professionally so after this class is completed I plan to work further on this and see if I can get it to work.  

People and Organizations that I am following on Twitter

1. Dimitrios Verteouris ‏ @DeeNaturesGrill
2. ChooseMyPlate.gov ‏ Verified account @MyPlate
3. # Eggface ‏ @Eggface
4.   Dr. David L. Katz ‏ @DrDavidKatz
5. Yoni Freedhoff, M.D. ‏ @YoniFreedhoff
6. ECOG ‏ @ECOGobesity
7. Matt Popilek ‏ @MPandTeamHEART
8. Healthier Generation ‏ Verified account @HealthierGen
9. ObesityHelp ‏ @obesityhelp
10. CampaignToEndObesity ‏ @ToEndObesity
11. Obesity Help ‏ @obesity_help
12.   The Obesity Society ‏ @ObesitySociety
13. Yale Rudd Center ‏ @YaleRuddCenter
14. girlshealth.gov ‏ Verified account @girlshealth
15. womenshealth.gov ‏ Verified account @womenshealth
16. WHO ‏ Verified account @WHO
17. Dr. Mehmet Oz ‏ Verified account @DrOz
18. Cardiac Surgeon and Host of The Dr. Oz Show
19. CDC_eHealth ‏ Verified account @CDC_eHealth

    AMA ‏ @AmerMedicalAssn
20. NIH ‏ Verified account @NIH

     In 2007, I began doing research in to Morbid Obesity and Weight Loss.  At the time that I began my research, I was considering having Bariatric surgery in order to lose weight.  It was a matter of life and death at the time.  I had already had two major heart attacks, a small stroke that robbed me of my math skills and part of my vision, diabetes, and had recently become legally blind as a result of the diabetes. 
     I had to lose the weight or die.  I had tried dieting and exercise. As the mom of 26 kids, I was always on the move.  However, I got very little sleep because of parenting children with autism and severe medical needs.  My stress levels were always very high due to the stress of caring for teens with mental illness, kids with intellectual disabilities, and constant hospitalizations for my youngest child.
      Lack   of sleep and constant stress kept my cortisol levels so high that weight loss was very difficult. 

I am following  the Rudd Center at Yale University because this group produces excellent research on the subject of obesity especially on obesity bias.  I chose Obesity Help because this online support group for individuals who are considering or who have had bariatric surgery is an excellent resource.  Eggface is a woman who is on Obesity Help who has excellent post bariatric surgery recipes.  The others were interesting to me because of their interest in prevention and treatment of obesity in ways that protect the dignity of the individual.  

Polaroid  Cowboy Collage

First I opened a new document in photoshop and selected 1000x1000 pixels.  Then I clicked Control I to invert it to a black square.  then I chose image and canvas size and selected 1100x1100 pixels to put a white frame around the picture.  Next I again selected image canvas size and typed 1300 into the pixel box for height and anchored it to the top center  hit enter   This made a polaroid shaped frame.   I went over to the right of the screen to the layers menu and changed the name of the background layer.   I selected the inner square  with the magic select tool and hit del which erased the square.  then I hit deselect.  next I used the magic select tool to select the outer border and clicked.  then I chose fill from the edit menu and chose pattern and chose the third from the last of the patterns  white pattern.  hit enter and filled the frame.  I chose deselect  then used the magic select tool and selected the inner square and then layer style bevel and emboss  then increased size slightly and softened as much as I could by sliding the slider to the right all the way. I added a layer and then selected merge visable layers clicked save as .psd file.  then I hit select all copy and opened the family shot from the rodeo parade.   I went to the upper left corner and hit paste.  the frame appeared very large.  so I reduced its size  using free transform and placed the first frame over my husband's picture.  I hit enter then hit free transform to make the  frame the right size.  Then I chose Control J to copy the frame and control T to free transform and placed my other frames where I wanted them using the above sequence.    Select deselect.  When I had the frames where I wanted them I Placed a layer mask and hit edit fill and filled the background with white.  Then i selected the inner part of each frame and chose paste into.  this put the photo segment into the frames.  I repeated this for each frame.  I selected the layer for the each frame and clicked layer style and drop shadow to place shadows under the photos.  This was a really fun assignment.   I will use this in December to prepare my family photos.  

Reflection on the instructional Power Point assignment.
      I enjoyed this assignment.  I took an old lesson that i had presented in class and made it into a Power Point presentation.  I followed  all the things that I learned in the videos.  Because of my vision problems i find that it is easier to read the slides if the background is left white so I left it white.  One challenge that I found was putting hyperlinks with the photos.  Iaccidentally put the wrong url in the hyperlink and it took me a long time to figure out how to change it.  Eventually I deleted the whole slide and started over.  I managed to figure that out but in the process.   I think that I probably removed the animation that I had placed on one photo.  I don't believe that I remembered to replace it after I redid the slide.  The other issue was the scanned picture.  I didn't have any appropriate photos so I drew a cartoon  and scanned that.  but since I only had a ball point pen, the lines were not as dark as I would have liked them to be ,so it may not be as visible as the rest of the presentation.
Today's students are used to being entertained.  However, entertaining Powerpoints aren't as effective in helping them learn.  I would rather that my students remembered the content of my slides rather than the cute pictures, fancy transitions or animations.  I have had a teacher in the past that used so many gimmicks that students merely rolled their eyes and sighed at the wasted time.  I will  use Power point for making presentations for the classroom and for conferences.  I feel a lot more comfortable using them now.

This is a photo of my husband, David, with his father and grandfather.  The color was off and the details This were not clear.









This is the photo after I edited it using Adobe Photoshop.
Here are my steps in editing the photo.
1. I cropped the photo to remove the black border.
2. I clicked image and adjustments and then curves and reduced the amount of red in the photo.  I adjusted the blue and green a bit as well.
3. I clicked image and adjustments and then brightness/ contrast and brightened the photo and increased the contrast a bit
4. I clicked image and adjustment and then hue/ saturation and moved toward more saturation .
5. I used the spot healing brush to remove some white specks from the photo.
6.  There was a scrapbooking tape stuck on the original photo and I used clone  and the healing brush to fix the suit.  This was the hardest part of the job.  I redid it several times before I was happy with it.  There are some errors but all in all I think that It turned out pretty good.


I really enjoyed this project.  I had watched all the Lynda.com videos and purchased a book on Photoshop and have been learning a lot.  I think that this will be helpful to me in the future in my role as family historian.  We have a large family and I have boxes and boxes of old photos.  I especially was delighted to learn about adobe bridge which allows cataloging without repeatedly saving photos into separate files.  This will save me tons of disk space.  I was horrified to learn that every time i save a jpg I was losing quality.  Lesson learned I will save things as tif or raw in the future.  I was able to share what I learned with a friend that just got adobe Photoshop.  

 

 How I made a movie poster of my son and his wife and baby to be.

First I chose a close up photo of my son and his wife on their Facebook page and saved it to my computer. I opened it into Photoshop.   It was horizontally oriented, so I selected the area that I wanted using the rectangular marquee tool and then chose crop..  I used the  Image menu and selected canvas size and  changed it to pixels and added 100 pixels H and W.  then I again selected image canvas size and added 300 pixels  to the height anchored to the top.    this gave me a white border all around and a wider space at the bottom to add the baby to.  I used this opportunity to adjust the image.  I chose image  adjustments and selected hue saturation.  I moved the saturation slider all the way to the left getting a gray scale image.  I adjusted the brightness up slightly and the contrast down slightly.  Then I opened the baby picture. I trimmed away the frame and the blue corners using the crop tool.  then I used the clone tool to fill in the upper left and lower right corners.   ( alt select the spot you wish to copy  then apply to the area you wish it to be in. 

 Next I used the move tool and clicked and held on the baby picture and dragged it to the tab for the parent picture and continued to hold as I dragged it into position.  I released and the baby picture was way too big  so I used the  free transform to size it correctly.  I clicked enter.    on the right side I clicked on the background layer and changed the name  so that I could edit it.  I have done this collage two times and this time I selected the baby picture and desaturated it and lightened it slightly.  I reduced the contrast all the way to the left.  I placed this layer below the parent layer.  I used an eraser tool with a large fuzzy brush to erase away the edges of the baby picture gradually fading them out  by decreasing the opacity greatly and using repeated strokes.  then I selected the parent layer and used the same eraser technique to  erase the area over the baby.  I realized that the baby was too far down on the page so I selected the move tool and lifted it up close under the mother's hair.  I erased away more leaving a little of the mothers hair hanging down over the baby.    I merged visible layers and then cropped the whole picture   I used the sepia tone selection to change the tone of the picture.

 and enlarged the frame around it a bit.  I then added a layer mask and filled with black and then used layer style to bevel the frame and add shadows and glow.    I also included my other attempt. 

 

 

Reflections on My ETEC experience

    When I started this class I was pretty anxious. After I read the announcements and Introduction, I was terrified!  We had just moved into our house, built in 1870, and the electrical system, plumbing, and furnace system were in critical condition. We didn't have a kitchen.  I was just recovering from a Pulmonary Embolism.  We finally located my laptop  and then several days later my cord  and found that the laptop wouldn't stay on.  So we had to purchase another computer 
     In the midst of this school started for our 7 younger kids and we had to get 5 of them settled in special ed classes.  The first few weeks I had three ER visits because of various things but finally got my health in line.  We got a cooking range, and got the kitchen functional.  We purchased a pellet stove and fuel and hopefully will get that installed soon. We got several bathrooms functional and got a new hot water heater installed. 
     Through all of this I got online sporadically but this week finally got to spend some serious computer time.  The more I watch the videos and read the websites the less anxious I am feeling.  At this point I am excited about the things that I am learning and can see applications for them in the classroom and in conducting research.  I can't wait to explore these areas more fully and check out the other areas. 
      I used to be pretty good at using my computer ( an Atari)  way back when, I did desk top publishing and created newsletters  then  I got an ACER and later a digital camera.  I love editing pictures but don't know a lot about the photoshop commands and want to learn.  I have CS5 on an older computer but it doesn't have internet.