Let's Talk Technology

December 4, 2004

Attendance: Eileen Heasley, Carol Isakson, Carol Klosowski, Laura Cummings, Mary Jeanne Franzinger, Sue McFeely, Dyann Smith, Karen Bunting
Place: Macomb County ISD

Discussions

Introductions: We introduced ourselves for the benefit of Karen Bunting, retired from WCResa. 
Updates in what our members are doing include: 

• Carol I.’s school. received an $800,000 Dept of Education grant in American History. If you want to view information about the grant, go to http://tah.pccs.k12.mi.us/ 

• Laura is coordinating the rewriting of Royal Oak’s technology plan and working on using Smart Board. 

• Eileen talked about her water filter project and brought pictures from Nepal. Sue suggested we have our Let’s Talk group sponsor one filter (cost $50). http://www.avisionforcleanwater.org.

• Carol K. mentioned teachers can view Imax movies free at The Henry Ford on selected days.

Speaker:    This month’s speaker was Jim Wenzloff of the Macomb ISD demonstrating Adobe Photoshop Elements.

First, however, Jim talked about Blogs (web logs) and how some schools are even replacing their web sites with Blogs. You can visit Jim’s main blog page by visiting http://www.visitmyclass.com/ and signing up, even if you are not a Macomb County teacher. He also talked about Bloglines, a free service where you can create lists of blogs you want to keep track of.

Jim showed us the Furl site http://www.furl.net/ which will archive your favorites so you can search them by keyword, category, or date.

Before getting into Adobe Photoshop Elements, Jim told us about Picasa, http://www.picasa.com/, a free program from Google which will scan your hard drive for all pictures and help you organize, edit, and print them. 

The Adobe demonstration was most enlightening as was Jim’s spiral bound handout. Jim talked about taking digital pictures at high resolutions, so if you resize them, they will compress with more pixels/inch and therefore print with better quality. Be sure to save any resized, edited pictures under a different name so you will always have the original available for future use. Web site pictures do not need to be more than 72 pixels/inch. Jim also talked about the layers feature of Adobe, a most useful, but somewhat difficult technique to master.

Next Meeting:        Our next meeting will be January 8, 2005. Karl Zinn will host us at the Ann Arbor Hands On Museum.

Minutes submitted by: Mary Jeanne Franzinger, December 5, 2004
Photos recorded and resized by: Laura Cummings (hmmm, not in any of the pictures)
Webpage assembled by: Carol Isakson