Subbing Daze

Summer Days

dorisgaby — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:40:23 +0000

So it’s summer time! My last spring class wrapped up beautifully. I really enjoyed learning Indesign. There are so many uses for it! I made our father’s day cards very quickly using Indesign.
Yesterday I went to visit the new school that I will be working at in August. This week I will be visiting to get to know parents and students. It is kind of weird because I mostly am just observing and I am very nervous. Many questions come to mind…
Will I fit in?
How will the kids be with me?
Can I really do this????
I know that I can and I know it’s just butterflies in my stomach…but even so it’s always tough being a newbie.
Summer will go fast and my first day will be here before we know it. There will be no going back than.
At least I can say one thing….
I won’t be missing subbing at all!!!

Social Nights Poster

dorisgaby — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:58:52 +0000

Third Project Educ 519

Not sure why some of the layer boxes showed up on the jpeg file but you get the idea!

Personal Stationary with Indesign

dorisgaby — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:45:32 +0000

Single page flyer with Indesign

dorisgaby — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 05:36:13 +0000

My second project for educ 519

Indesign: A newbie’s perspective

dorisgaby — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 04:44:14 +0000

Okay so my latest class has me working with Adobe Indesign. This class has been pretty cool and very project based. A major plus for me was that a lot of the tools are similar to photoshop. Plus getting to work with Indesign means that you will be using photoshop, which for me is tons of fun! I got a good grasp of understanding the importance of layers pretty quickly. And now that I am working with putting together a book, working with pages and layers makes life a lot easier.

One thing I wish I would have done with my book is consider layout ahead of time. Since it’s kind of a photo book I could have thought out how many picture boxes I wanted on each page and put it on my template so I wouldn’t have to draw out a million picture boxes. I ended up drawing 3 boxes on 21 pages as opposed to 3 or 4 boxes on my original page and them just copied that page 21 times.
I have become pretty adept at using Indesign. I know that in this day of microsoft word and pages these would be faster tools. But Indesign is well worth the 9 weeks to learn because it has so many capabilities that the others do not offer. I know that I can now design a flyer in the same time that it would take me in the other programs.

Finding People to follow on Twitter

dorisgaby — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 16:32:52 +0000

So I have been back from Spring Break (Houston) since Sunday but my brain hasn’t come back with me! No really I have just been lying low. Last night I began my next class Document design focusing on Adobe InDesign. Looks like I am going to learn a lot and it’s a really neat program. Plus I will get a good review of Photoshop.
Now there has been a lot of twitter news lately, Ashton, CNN and Oprah…but I still maintain it’s a cool professional tool as well as entertaining. So last night in class I was kind of put on the spot about how I choose to follow people. I am still very new and figuring things out. When I first joined I went with the whole social aspect of twitter and went for famous people and friends. Since than I have become a little more selective.

So here is a list of some ways I choose people to follow.

___ is now following you. When I get the message that someone is following me I check out their twitter page. If what they say looks like something I would like to read I follow. Personally if all they do is re-tweet I usually don’t. If they re-tweet cool stuff or links than I follow.
Twitter Applications, like Twellow. Another way I search is by use 3rd party applications that let you search twitter pages and profiles. I just put in technology elementary teacher….etc keywords that interest me. Then a list of people comes up. I then go and check out their pages…etc.
Twitter find people. Yes for some this might be the first place to go, but for me it’s the last. I only use it when I know exactly who I am looking for. For example you can check for a friend by first and last name. Last night as I was sitting in class, I had a bright idea. I went to the adobe Indesign video tutorials and looked at who the instructors were. I then went and searched for their names on twitter and low and behold some of them had twitter accounts.

So are these the best way to find people? Not sure, I am always trying new ways and up for your suggestions. The best part though is that if I made a bad choice I can always not follow that person!

Rate my doodle!

dorisgaby — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:44:49 +0000

Okay so I found this site, soooo coool. It’s called rate my doodle. You can draw pictures orrrr you can create movies with your pics, like stop animation. It shows frame by frame and then you can share your movies. I played around with it. Very fun. I can’t wait to show my boy! You can check out how it works without joining and it’s free. If you want to save your stuff then you join. Have a go at it!
Rate my doodle

Presentation

dorisgaby — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:50:12 +0000

So here is my presentation…check it out! Hope you like.
My presentation

Online presentation applications

dorisgaby — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:28:57 +0000

So today I present and as I should be working on that I am blogging! Nice. But I had too! Because in presenting I have come across something I would really like to blog about. In my need to stay cutting edge… yeah right, I decided that I wanted to use an online presentation application. I came accross several options ( Full list see bottum). I narrowed these down to well one at first: slide rocket. So I choose slide rocket and began working. It really is pretty and not to hard to navigate but when it came time to import movies I came accross a huge problem. It only import flash movies. It may seem like I have all the time in the world since I am writing this post and not working on my presentation, but I don’t.

So I had to scrap what I had there or put it on pause. So I went back to my list and this time had a better idea of what I should look for. I moved on to Empressr. So far I like it. It is definitely not as fancy as slide rocket, but it does the job. It is nice looking too. I have been “empressed by it’s capabilities! Plus my computer died on me yesterday but because I had uploaded my pics and movies to my empressr library no qualms because I can keep plugging away after I finish this post. It’s all there waiting for me.
The list of online presentation apps:
Ajax 13
280 Slides
Slide rocket (see above)
Empressr ” “
And of course good old google docs also has presentation apps.

Using paint in class

dorisgaby — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:05:24 +0000

Today I introduced paint to the third grade class I subbed for. They really liked it. Again it was low threshold and high ceiling. So students could either do a lot or just keep it simple, but all students were able to participate. Here is a student’s work. Cool huh?

So in a school where the students had technology available to them I was able to use it even though I wasn’t their regular teacher. Plus I sidestepped the whole question of monitoring what site they were on. I just used a tool as simple as paint. If students needed more boundaries or if they already knew how to use paint I could have assigned them some work using paint. Like paint a picture about something in your life, draw yourself and then list 3 cool things about yourself, or listen to this story and draw your favorite part.

using paint