NanaCJ's_ETEC_5213 Reflection Blog: November 2013

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

"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.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

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.

Sunday, November 17, 2013

People and Organizations that I am following on Twitter

     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.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

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.