Instructional Website

For my instructional website, I created several pages on how to create digital scrapbooking pages. This has been a hobby of mine for years and I think it's a great way for people to preserve their memories. Here is a screen capture of the homepage for my site:

While creating this website, I encountered several obstacles and experienced many successes. Using a Dreamweaver template was very helpful in creating the basic layout of my website. It helped me a lot when figuring out how to create the website menu and adding text to the footer. The CSS style sheet that came with the template was also very helpful when I wanted to change something because of all the notes in the stylesheet. The main obstacle I experienced concerned CSS. Although we have worked with CSS a lot this semester, I still don't feel really comfortable with it and there is still so much I don't know. I had a lot of trouble positioning my images because I didn't want them to float left or right and I couldn't remember if I'd learned how to center position images. In the end, I googled my question and found an answer.

Dreamweaver features that I would like to use in the future would be learning how to create forms for websites and using Spry widgets. I'd also like to get more comfortable with CSS. Overall, I enjoyed making the website and hope that I can grow my skills in the future.

My audio experience

For my audio project, I used Audacity to record an mp3 and then post it on my blog. Although my husband has used Audacity before to record mp3s, I had never used it before and I actually had no idea he'd used this program until after I'd finished my project! I enjoyed learning how to insert music into the audio of me speaking and fade it in and out.

The hardest thing for me with this project was uploading the mp3 and shockwave player to my blog. Although I'd followed the instructions exactly, somewhere in the mix some quotation marks got deleted and that threw me off. I just had to go over everything I did in detail to find where my mistake was. When it finally all worked, I was elated.

I think the whole project was a success in general and I think it would be fun to create podcasts just as a hobby, especially now that I feel like I'm a bit more familiar with how to do it. I learned how to use a new program I was unfamiliar with and one that will be very useful to me as I go throughout my studies and my job. For future projects, Audacity could be useful when recording audio for any online trainings I might be putting together for my job.

Audio

Using Photoshop

For my photoshop assignment, I chose to repair and retouch an image and use an oil paint filter on the photo. Here is the original image.

And here is the finished image.

To retouch the image I followed these steps: 

1. I opened the raw file in camera raw and clicked on the Auto settings. That adjusted the exposure and histogram to better levels. Then, I clicked on the white balance eye dropper tool in Camera Raw and set the white balance by clicking on some of the white snow in the background.
2. Next I opened the photo in photoshop and then duplicated the photo and renamed the second layer “Retouch.”
3. The first thing I did was use the elliptical marquee tool to circle different blemishes on my face and then use the content aware function to fill the blemishes. I also used the spot healing brush and content aware option and the healing brush to clear some smaller blemishes and stray hairs.
4. I used the dodge tool to brighten up some dark spots on my face and also used Gaussian blur to soften the lines, etc around my face. 

On this last photo, I used the oil paint filter in photoshop. I didn't really encounter many obstacles with this activity since I followed some of the online tutorials step-by-step and I feel like I was successful is eliminating many of the blemishes on my face in the original photo. Learning more about photoshop is important to me right now because I love photography and digital art. One of my hobbies is digital scrapbooking and I use photoshop to to put my artwork together. I love learning new shortcuts in photoshop and would love to seamlessly be able to retouch portrait photos. In my future profession, knowing photoshop is very important for editing photos and putting together engaging instruction for whatever type of company I work for.

Microsoft Word & Accessibility

I have used Microsoft Word my entire life and there are still so many things I don't know about the program. I believe I've even had a formal training class or two and despite that, I still learned something new with this exercise. During the Microsoft Word Accessibility project, I used Microsoft Word to create a software instruction manual on how to download the free genealogy software called Personal Ancestral File created by FamilySearch.org.

During this project, I encountered a few obstacles. In the past, I have used the themes in Microsoft Word but I do not use them very often so I had to figure out how to best incorporate the themes into my project to make it accessible. I used the FamilySearch logo as a color reference and was pleased with the color theme I chose. I also forgot to use Alt text on all the screen captures so I had to go back and enter those. I'm still trying to learn what is the best way to enter text in the Alt text option.

I was pleased with the way the overall project turned out. I was successful in using Snagit to get my screen captures and I liked how the screen captures integrated into the project as a whole.

 This project helped me learn more about how to make Word documents more accessible. Creating accessible documents is important so all people can have access to instruction regardless of their abilities. In the future when creating documents, I plan on utilizing tools like Alt text and Word themes.

PowerPoint and Instruction

For my PowerPoint Instructional Project, I created an instructional PowerPoint presentation on Dealing with Difficult People. The PowerPoint presentation will be supplemental to classroom instruction when teaching this topic. In the past, I have used PowerPoint in similar ways to give presentations or teach human resource based classes for my job.

While creating my instructional PowerPoint, I encountered several obstacles. Before when I've created PowerPoint presentations, I'd never adhered to the six by six rule and that was a challenge for me to do during this project. I think I tend to make text heavy slides so this was a good thing for me to work on. I resolved this by just being conscious of what I was doing and actually going back and counting how many words and bullet points were on each slide. Another obstacle I encountered was a lack of knowledge about the topic. I decided to create a presentation on Dealing with Difficult People because I knew this would be valuable for me to use at work but I had to do a lot of research to put the presentation together and I still need to do a lot of research before I feel confident in presenting this to the university as staff training. Researching my topic more helped me build the slides in my presentation. One more challenge I encountered was adding ALT Text to the images. It was the first time I'd done this but I was able to do it with some help from our instructor.

Creating the presentation was a success in itself. I created instruction that we needed at work and with a little more research, I'll be able to present it to employees. I enjoyed adding images because as I mentioned before I tend to just have text on my PowerPoints and focus more on instruction delivery but this assignment made me realize that I need to equally focus on how the PowerPoint looks so it isn't distracting for users and is equally accessible at the same time. If there are too many words on the PowerPoint, then people will get lost in the text and not focus on what they are supposed to be learning. It is important to create presentations that optimize instruction so learners experience the best possible outcome and achieve their learning goals.

In the future, I will continue to use PowerPoint to create different training presentations for Human Resources.  In doing so, I will make it as accessible as possible by using ALT text on images and following the six by six rule. I also plan on using PowerPoint as a storyboard for when I create online training modules at some point in the future.

My blogging experience

I started a family blog several years ago to keep up with friends and family and I discovered that I love blogging. I love writing blog entries and I love reading other people's blogs. However, I'm not the type of blogger who puts really personal things on the internet. Currently, I use blogger.com for my family blog although like many people, I don't update it as much as I should. I'm familiar with the blogger format but there's always something new you can learn about blogger and its more advanced features.