Photo shop

Tuesday April 10th:
During this class we learned about the use of photo shop, we looked at the many different types of photos and we created our own photo to see if we could make it look as realistic as possible.  To help us do this we took three different photos from three different sources and put them together to create one photo with the three images within the photo.  We also learned some ways to help us figure out if a photo is real or if it is photo shopped.  Some of the things that we looked at were the shadows, the flash that may appear on a person's face, if there is red-eye in both of the people's eyes, when looking at the gradient of a photo, can we tell if the photo is real or not, and when we look at the background.

What I learned from the class:
I thought that this activity was a lot of fun.  I enjoyed trying to put all three of the photos together, but it was a little frustrating when I did not know how to do something.  I know that I take a lot longer when working on things and I get frustrated when I do not know how to do something and it causes me to get further behind, but once I got started and worked on it for a while it did become a little easier.  I learned how to scan a photo onto the computer, I learned how to put the pictures together, I learned how to fade the outline of a photo to make it look realistic, and I learned how to upload the image up onto flickr.  I had not worked with photo shop before and I thought that it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot of new things.

How would I use this in my classroom:
I would use this in my classroom to make fun educational posters to put up around the room.  I would have my students help me with this by each year as a group we come up with a new poster and we use photos of the class or activities that we did to create them.  As a class we could come up with an educational class slogan, what we want on the poster, and on the back I would put all of the names of the students and put the year.  I could also make small copies of the poster to give to the students as a present at the end of the year so that they could remember the fun times that they had in the classroom.  I would also use this in my classroom to create games.  We could create game boards that the students could do during free time in the class or during recess if it is raining.  I believe that doing fun things like this in the classroom would really get the students involved and they would have a lot of fun learning.