Week Nine - Photoshop Fun!!

And when I say "fun", I mean that in the future sense.  I have yet to see the fun in this.  I use a version of adobe on my old PC in my office at home for my pictures.  It is much more user friendly and easy to understand.  I have certainly come to realize that photo shop is hard.  I think that it will in the end be fun and I know that with three kids and an enormous amount of digital pictures, I can and will learn and use it.  For this assignment, once realizing my photo shop inadequacy, I stuck with some of the more remedial items for editing my picture.  As you can probably see right away I cropped it to a more close up version of the kids.  The next thing that I did was try to put a border around it, and as you can see, did not figure it out.  So instead I played around with the colors.  I changed the shadows, mid tone, and the highlights.  I really enjoyed playing with these different tones and I cant wait to have free time to do this with some of my other pictures that are great but just not right with the lighting or shadowing. 

I would have to say that my biggest obstacle is that I have not been paying enough attention to the tutorials.  Since using an adobe program previously I am afraid to say that I thought it would be more self explanatory than it is and now I know that I need to do a google search for  "photo shop for dummies".  I need to redo some of them and add some that I thought that I might not need.  Time is a factor in my life right now and hours of tutorials are hard to fit in without getting really sleepy in the late night hours that I find to fit them in.  It might be easier for me to read something instead. 

The biggest thing I learned was my inadequacy of this program, but I did get my feet wet and that is important.  I am willing to work on this and do better in the future. 

The future for me and photo shop is unlimited!  Like I said before I have an enormous library of digital photos and with three kids there are plenty that have one or maybe two kids looking great and the third with a monkey face.  So I cant wait to learn this program and really get to work with it for my future photo albums. 

I am sure that there are possibilities for use in the education arena as well for my future teaching career as well.

Getting in Deep!

HTML and CSS, I have to say are very interesting to me.  I had NO idea how websites were made and i really thought that it was like rocket science.  Well, now that I am getting my feet wet in this arena, I am not sure it is rocket science but maybe more like a new language that I am learning and I am stuck on how to say, "hello".  I have now made a super basic web page with the html assignment, which I did have a little trouble with.  I now realize that just because it looks like a space on the tutorial doesn't mean that there really is a space and that I should check more than one source of information.  Due to my lack of html knowledge prior to this course I was still pleased with my outcome and have learned even more since the grading of the assignment.  As for the CSS, I found myself wanting to bang my head against a wall until I realized that what I need is more time in my day, and another day in my week.  I as struggling a bit with finding the time that I need for this course to do all of the tutorials and to do them again so that I really understand the concept.  I do feel like I have made some progress in self scheduling this week and really hope that it will show in my work.

I do feel like I am learning a lot but still feel like I am left at the end of the week, praying that it is enough to build on in the week to come.   I am intrigued by what we are learning and am excited that I am actually able to make a basic page and can make changes to a style sheet and somewhat understand what all of that even means.  This course still makes me nervous, but is challenging me and that is worth it. I look forward to see if I am able to learn how to make my own family blog much cooler than it is now with the basic stock format. Or maybe even a family website that the whole family can use. As far as my future career, I feel that what I am learning opens countless doors considering that my goal is to teach online courses.  I feel that as much information in this area that I can acquire will only help me in the career arena and make me more marketable.   

I look forward to what is to come!