My son, Ross, just called me in class this morning to let me know that this coming June I will be the Grandfather to most undoubtedly the cutest little baby girl in the world. How about that. Honestly, I am too young to be a grandfather, but I will handle it. My feet are not touching the ground right now.
Unfortunately for me, Ross and his wife Lindsey live in Louisville, Kentucky. So I will have to travel to see the baby. My other son, Scott, Just moved to Louisville this past month. He asked his brother if they heard more than one heartbeat. Kind of an in side joke because Lindsey has triplet siblings (two girls and a boy that are now 17 years old) and there is a big history of triplets in her immediate family. That would be someting. I would probably have to move to Louisville too!
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Blog # 4 - How will I use Newsletters Professionally?
Being a teacher and a coach offers a wide variety of areas where I can use a newsletter professionally. I would love to have a Greene County Career Center Newsletter published quarterly maybe even monthly. In fact, I think this will become an assignment for my Junior class. I can divide my 15 students into groups of 3 and give each one a section or column to write for the Newsletter. We have digital cameras to take pictures. Finding topics that are relevant to them would be the problem for me. I have learned that giving them some freedom and lattitude in this area often generates a lot more creativity and excitement about doing things. It does have to be monitored very heavily regarding content and appropriateness these days. They will put down anything that comes into their minds.
My intentions for Information Technology would be to have a section on the class itself - what is goingon in the Junior Lab and in the Senior Lab. We just finished our BPA (Business Professionals of America) regional contest and next week will find the results of who in my classes won and will advance on to the State contest. We could have a section on all of BPA at GCCC and cover other Business Academy winners. A section highlighting a student of the quarter / month that would not be written by that student. Have someone conduct an actual interview and write the article.
As a basketball Coach I am developing ( for this class assignment ) a Newsletter about the school I coach at. Most of it will pertain to my Boy's Basketball teams. Using Pictures, statictics, game summaries and highlights> Stivers is 65% through a major construction / remodel project using State and Local money. A section on the construction and a picture storyline would be a nice feature. The students and faculty moved out of the Stivers building about a year and a half ago for this construction to take place. They plan to move back in next October.
There are many ways to make use of a newsletter. Truthfully, I never realized it was as easy as it is with Microsoft Publisher. My school (GCCC) is a member of the Microsoft Alliance. Every student at GCCC receives a free copy of Windows XP Pro, Office XP Professional, and FrontPage. With Publisher being a part of Office every student will have this at home as well as on all the PC's in my classroom and lab. I hope to make good use of this.
My intentions for Information Technology would be to have a section on the class itself - what is goingon in the Junior Lab and in the Senior Lab. We just finished our BPA (Business Professionals of America) regional contest and next week will find the results of who in my classes won and will advance on to the State contest. We could have a section on all of BPA at GCCC and cover other Business Academy winners. A section highlighting a student of the quarter / month that would not be written by that student. Have someone conduct an actual interview and write the article.
As a basketball Coach I am developing ( for this class assignment ) a Newsletter about the school I coach at. Most of it will pertain to my Boy's Basketball teams. Using Pictures, statictics, game summaries and highlights> Stivers is 65% through a major construction / remodel project using State and Local money. A section on the construction and a picture storyline would be a nice feature. The students and faculty moved out of the Stivers building about a year and a half ago for this construction to take place. They plan to move back in next October.
There are many ways to make use of a newsletter. Truthfully, I never realized it was as easy as it is with Microsoft Publisher. My school (GCCC) is a member of the Microsoft Alliance. Every student at GCCC receives a free copy of Windows XP Pro, Office XP Professional, and FrontPage. With Publisher being a part of Office every student will have this at home as well as on all the PC's in my classroom and lab. I hope to make good use of this.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Blog # 3 - How I will use image editing professionally.
My classroom for Information Technology offers a vast playground for the use of image editing. I plan on teaching a mini session on the use of Adobe Photoshop in my Junior IT class. In years past I have had to rely on finding a student in my class that was good enough at Photoshop to do some of the posters or photographs that I needed for the lab. Now I am capable of doing these myself and even better yet, teaching my students how to create these. On the first day of school I have each student take a picture of themselves and store it on their student drive. We then make two photographs using this picture and text to create a composite photograph of their picture and their name, home school, grade, nickname. etc. One of these picture gets taped to the back of the LCD on their classroom desk PC. The other photo gets folded into a triangle and is taped somewhere at their lab station - usually on the top of their CRT. These two photos aid greatly in everyone learning names and schools as well as marking their work areas in both the classroom and the lab area.
There are a great many other things I would love to do. We take tons of digital pictures throughout the year. So far most of them have been relegated to trhe CD or floppy disk they are shot onto. I have two older Sony Mavica FD95 cameras that take still photos and short 5 second mpegs to a floppy disk. I also have a Sony Handycam that shoots movies and still pictures to a mini DVD-R disk. In the Business Academy at Greene County Career Center we also have a very high quality poster printer. I plan on making use of Adobe to create some very nice posters of my students "in action" and add text, shading, background, etc. to these posters, and then hang them throughout my classroom / lab and the hallways around my area.
Zillions of uses - limited only by the imaginations of my students ( and rated / approved by me ).
There are a great many other things I would love to do. We take tons of digital pictures throughout the year. So far most of them have been relegated to trhe CD or floppy disk they are shot onto. I have two older Sony Mavica FD95 cameras that take still photos and short 5 second mpegs to a floppy disk. I also have a Sony Handycam that shoots movies and still pictures to a mini DVD-R disk. In the Business Academy at Greene County Career Center we also have a very high quality poster printer. I plan on making use of Adobe to create some very nice posters of my students "in action" and add text, shading, background, etc. to these posters, and then hang them throughout my classroom / lab and the hallways around my area.
Zillions of uses - limited only by the imaginations of my students ( and rated / approved by me ).
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Blog # 2 - My Photoshop Experiences So far
Wow - I never thought you would be able to do so much so easily with this Photoshop tool. To date I am completely overwhelmed with what we have covered in class. Staying up with Fawn as she does things in Photoshop and trying to take notes at the same time is quite a chore. One thing I have found is that graduating from college over 30 years ago, my note taking has become very bad.
Another sad realization I have come to is that you can drive your self crazy trying to remember every step you did in class creating an image. The concept of layers is very cool. And I love the history browser. I make a ton of mistakes and it is great to be able to drop back past the one level of undo to the last good image or to the starting point (I do this often!). The guys that wrote the Photoshop software were top-notch and on the ball ( a plug from an old has-been programmer ).
Selecting the images I have used so far is very easy for me. I have been taking digital pictures for many years. The neatest thing I have done so far is to take three different pictures of the family dogs and pull the image of each dog and put them together into one picture as if I took that picture. I have decided that it is a very good thing that I did not choose being a graphic artist for a career. It is very hard for me to control the lasso while tracing around images.
I would love to learn more about plopping an image into another image and making it seamlessly blend in. Oh - that is this weeks lesson.
The kinds of pictures and images I find interesting all deal with my family, my team, and my students. There is always something you wish you could add or delete from a photograph. For basketball we always take our team picture at the very beginning of the year. last year I had a young man that I had to dismiss from my team for violation of my rules. They would not have a professional photographer retake our team picture so I did it myself. It would have been so nice to just take this one player out of the existing picture. I can do that with Photoshop. I am also always adding text to the team pictures ie; year, names of players, etc. I have always struggled doing this in MS-Paint. Looks to be a lot easier and more flexible to do with Photoshop.
Another sad realization I have come to is that you can drive your self crazy trying to remember every step you did in class creating an image. The concept of layers is very cool. And I love the history browser. I make a ton of mistakes and it is great to be able to drop back past the one level of undo to the last good image or to the starting point (I do this often!). The guys that wrote the Photoshop software were top-notch and on the ball ( a plug from an old has-been programmer ).
Selecting the images I have used so far is very easy for me. I have been taking digital pictures for many years. The neatest thing I have done so far is to take three different pictures of the family dogs and pull the image of each dog and put them together into one picture as if I took that picture. I have decided that it is a very good thing that I did not choose being a graphic artist for a career. It is very hard for me to control the lasso while tracing around images.
I would love to learn more about plopping an image into another image and making it seamlessly blend in. Oh - that is this weeks lesson.
The kinds of pictures and images I find interesting all deal with my family, my team, and my students. There is always something you wish you could add or delete from a photograph. For basketball we always take our team picture at the very beginning of the year. last year I had a young man that I had to dismiss from my team for violation of my rules. They would not have a professional photographer retake our team picture so I did it myself. It would have been so nice to just take this one player out of the existing picture. I can do that with Photoshop. I am also always adding text to the team pictures ie; year, names of players, etc. I have always struggled doing this in MS-Paint. Looks to be a lot easier and more flexible to do with Photoshop.
Blog # 1 - It's All About Me !
My name is Richard C. Kayser. I currently am employed as a teacher of Information technology at the Greene Counter Career Center in Xenia, Ohio. I have re-entered the teaching profession after a 26 year hiatus.
During those 26 years I worked as a Systems Analyst ( fancy title for a computer programmer ) at NCR Corp ( 6 years ) and then at BASS, Inc. (20 years). BASS, Inc. provides complete systems to grocery store and mass merchandiser chains. I have software that I wrote in over 5000 grocery stores and mass merchandise stores around the world. Unfortunately for me, BASS was purchased by a company in Israel named Retalix Ltd. ( http://www.retalix.com/ ) and they decided after 3 years that they no longer needed my services. What a blow to my ego that was.
After a 3 month summer of searching for a new job, I found the position at Greene County Career Center. What better for me than to be able to go back into the teaching profession and to be able to teach about computers. The only bad element was the big cut in salary I had to swallow. I am having a ball teaching A+ PC Repair & Troubleshooting, Network+ networking, Visual basic.NET programming, and Visual C++ programming to Juniors and seniors at the Career Center. Life is good again.
I have served as the Boys Junior Varsity Basketball coach at Dayton Stivers School for the Arts for the past 5 years. I get a great deal of satisfaction working with the young men that play for me. Quite a few of my past players have gone on to have a 1 or 2 year successful career at the Varsity level at Stivers. This is an even bigger thrill for me because I am an Alumni of Stivers (class of '72) as is my mother (class of '35). In fact my mother, who will turn 90 years old in March, still lives in the same house I grew up in just a few blocks away from Stivers in the South park Historical District in Dayton. Check out the picture of my JV team on the right.
I have really begun to delve into the world of Multimedia with my students. I often feel so inadequate because my students 1.) know so much more about this than I do, and 2.) they can do just about anything they want to in the way of editing and "touching-up" digital pictures. I have decided this class may give me the opportunity to catch up with them ( at least I hope so !).
For years I have been taking digital pictures and videos of family, teams, games, you name it. There are so many pictures I have that I would like to "adjust" or add to that I don't know where to begin. Maybe I will finally get around to doing just that.
During those 26 years I worked as a Systems Analyst ( fancy title for a computer programmer ) at NCR Corp ( 6 years ) and then at BASS, Inc. (20 years). BASS, Inc. provides complete systems to grocery store and mass merchandiser chains. I have software that I wrote in over 5000 grocery stores and mass merchandise stores around the world. Unfortunately for me, BASS was purchased by a company in Israel named Retalix Ltd. ( http://www.retalix.com/ ) and they decided after 3 years that they no longer needed my services. What a blow to my ego that was.
After a 3 month summer of searching for a new job, I found the position at Greene County Career Center. What better for me than to be able to go back into the teaching profession and to be able to teach about computers. The only bad element was the big cut in salary I had to swallow. I am having a ball teaching A+ PC Repair & Troubleshooting, Network+ networking, Visual basic.NET programming, and Visual C++ programming to Juniors and seniors at the Career Center. Life is good again.
I have served as the Boys Junior Varsity Basketball coach at Dayton Stivers School for the Arts for the past 5 years. I get a great deal of satisfaction working with the young men that play for me. Quite a few of my past players have gone on to have a 1 or 2 year successful career at the Varsity level at Stivers. This is an even bigger thrill for me because I am an Alumni of Stivers (class of '72) as is my mother (class of '35). In fact my mother, who will turn 90 years old in March, still lives in the same house I grew up in just a few blocks away from Stivers in the South park Historical District in Dayton. Check out the picture of my JV team on the right.
I have really begun to delve into the world of Multimedia with my students. I often feel so inadequate because my students 1.) know so much more about this than I do, and 2.) they can do just about anything they want to in the way of editing and "touching-up" digital pictures. I have decided this class may give me the opportunity to catch up with them ( at least I hope so !).
For years I have been taking digital pictures and videos of family, teams, games, you name it. There are so many pictures I have that I would like to "adjust" or add to that I don't know where to begin. Maybe I will finally get around to doing just that.
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