A friend of mine just wrote on his blog the other day about listening to yet another PowerPoint presentation by a teacher about a school they visited for professional development. As he said, boring. Any school administrator that likes to think, and say, that he is a big supporter of technology in the classroom and then puts up with these juvenile presentations as examples of professional development and technology use, should be looking for a job some place else. PowerPoint?
PowerPoint has its place. This is how PowerPoint should be used.
Taking an image out of a photo is actually quite easy. There are a number of ways to do this with Photoshop, but this manner is the easiest that I’ve found. Just follow the steps and let me know what you think.
Step 1
Open an image. For your first try, get an image that is relatively large in relation to the background
In this case, I want to take the image of my granddaughter out of the photo and put it in another one.
Step 2
Select the Magic Wand from the tools box. Click on the image that you want to remove. Hold down the shift key and continue to click until you have all of the image. Don’t worry about getting all of the imag5 on the first try. You can select the rest of the image on the next step.
Step 3
Click on the Edit in Quick Mask Mode in the Tools box at the bottom of the Tools box. Unselected areas will turn red. Use the Eraser Tool to add additional areas to your selection. Go back and forth between the Standard Mode and Quick Mask mode until you have erased all the red areas in the image that you want to cut out.
Step 4
In the Standard Mode if you see dancing pixels inside your image, it means that you haven’t erased them – thus selecting them for cut out – yet. Keep working until you are finished. If you want to remove something from your selection with the Eraser Tool, use the Paint Brush Tool.
Step 5
When you are finished selecting your image, go to the Edit in Standard Mode. Then Edit and Copy. Go to File>New and open a new image. It will open a canvas the correct size to accommodate the image tat you have just copied. Now paste your image. You have the image now with a transparent background.
Step 6
You can take this image and place it in another background.
Have you ever had the power cut out on you just as you were about to finish a complicated form that you spent an hour on? Or you wrote a great post for your favorite forum and when you hit the post button, it just disappeared? Frustrating isn’t it?
Lazarus is a great, and free, little add-on for Firefox. It automatically saves any data that you enter into a web form. It saves the form when you submit the data. If there’s a glitch, just go back to the page, right-click in the field of the form and Recover form. That’s it. Your valuable work and time has been saved thanks to Lazarus.
Technology is, of course, incredibly useful to most of us. You can do all sorts of wonderful creative things with tech tools. You can also bore people to death with both your work and your explanation of your work. One of those tools that gets used far too much and is the favorite of creatively-challenged, or just lazy, computer teachers is PowerPoint. I don’t know how many computer classes I’ve seen where the students are either making PowerPoint presentations or learning how to play with fonts in Word. PowerPoint has its uses, but does it need to be taught as a separate part of the curriculum year after year?
And while I’m on my PowerPoint rant, administrators really need to learn more about technology, or at least take some well-meaning advice on how to use PowerPoint presentations. I came across a great video about PowerPoint that beautifully satirizes the approach that I’ll be many of us have run across in staff meetings. Take a look at this, and use it with your students – it’s a great way to show what not to do with PowerPoint. Oh, and while you’re at it – show it to your administrators. It may help save you from Life After Death by PowerPoint.
Today’s post isn’t about technology per se, but rather about a website that comes to you via the wonders of the WWW. Arts and Letters Daily is one of the places that I go to every few days. ALD is a virtual goldmine for academics, scholars and rogue intellectuals. It’s published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The site is updated six days a week. There are three columns on the website: Articles of Note, New Books, and Essays and Opinion. The way that the site works is that there are short descriptions of an article with a link to the original source. The descriptions are well-written, and I’ve almost never been disappointed when I followed a link to an article that sounded interesting to me.
The site draws from a wide variety of newspapers, news sources, book reviews, nota bene, columnists, weblogs, radio news/music, diversions, classics, etc. The sources, while international, are weighted towards the United States and the UK. If you are a reader who wants to know about the ideas behind the news, ALD is a great place to look. And all this is free. I usually have more to read than I can deal with, and as the links move down each day, you can come back for weeks and re-read an article that you need for your work or pleasure.
So, if you’re a discerning reader who wants to know what some of the most prolific and insightful writers have to say about the issues of the day, you should take a look at Arts and Letters Daily.
Construction time is almost here. Tearing off the roof on the third floor and building a flattop concrete roof. Much less maintenance. 1 month ago
Still recovering from dengue after three weeks. I hope this ends quickly. Tomorrow the construction crew is coming to tear down the roof. 1 month ago
Tourists are all over Singaraja today. Main street, kampungs, Carrefour. Hardys. Looks like the tourist season is definitely upon us again. 2 months ago
Just back a few days now from Singapore. Over the exhaustion of the trip, but a good experience for the kids to get out of the kampung. 2 months ago
It's another beautiful day in Bali. Three days of no rain. My aphasia from the stroke last week seems to be mostly gone. I can finally speak 4 months ago
