Picassa

What:

This week in my computer class we tried to learn about a program called picassa. For some strange reason the program didn't want to work for many people in my class. Lucky for my group, The 5th element, it did work on Bries computer. We had a lot of fun in class working on our group project together. I think we created a really fun lesson plan.

So What:

After class I went home and played around with picassa to see if I could get it to work. It didn't. I could only get it to down load two out of twenty six of my images. I had several other people help me with it and we could not figure it out. I was able to edit my images on photo bucket and had some fun with that. I went back to picassa and tried using it on some of my pictures that were not for my computer class. My oldest son loves to do sketch work with a number two pencil. He down loaded photos of several of his pictures on my computer that made their way into picassa. We had so much fun editing them. We changed the colors, intensity,and back grounds.

I wish I had known about this before I did my oral presentation in my Astronomy class but in two weeks I will be teaching a sixth grade class a short health lesson on the affects of tobacco use. I wanted to make a short power point. Now I know how to make it more interesting.

Now What:

I think I will use the picassa program more as I get more familiar with it. There are also lots of other programs out there that do similar things, like photo bucket. I think it's a good idea to check them all out and see which one best suits your needs at the time. This could be a really good program for making a power point slide show that would play in the background as the fifth grade students do their patriotic program. You could also take pictures of all the fifth graders dressed up in their costumes for the wax museum and burn it on a CD with music to give to parents and students as a memento. It would be fun to let the sixth grade students take several pictures of their science project and edit them into a cool slides show that could be running at their booth. I would love to take pictures of things going on in our neighborhood like the kids playing basket ball or street hockey or the women out doing their yard work and then put the pictures together and have it playing at a neighborhood party. There are so many things to do that I don't think I have even scratched the suffice. I love playing around with my computer and discovering new things that I can do.

Video:

I thought the video this week was really funny mostly because I think at one time or another we have all seen everyone of those tips of power points that were mentioned. I am completely guilty of spelling mistakes. I am dyslexic and for some reason it is harder for me to catch my mistakes on the computer, than on paper. I always need to remember to after I do spell check to print it and check again.

I have always hated listen and seeing someones oral report in a class when all they do is read what's on their slide. When I do a PowerPoint I like to put just one or two bullet points that are only a few words long. This works as note cards for me that help me remember what I want to talk more in depth about.

When it comes to color coordinating on slides, the only thing I can think is that some people are color blind. We ran into this problem while we were making our PowerPoint. We had a slide that was green and we tried to make the words gold. It was so ugly we all said no way at the same time.

I think, just like anything else in life, there is a learning curve for creating beautiful slide presentations. The more you do it the better you will get at it.