Group Projects

Our Tech Resources class is coming to a close. To go out with a bang, we've been assigned group projects and have been tasked with finding the connections between performing arts and literacy. I have to admit, I felt overwhelmed by the broadness of the subject at first, but it has been a great learning process, and I really enjoy working with my teammates Susan and Michi. They are both great at HTML coding, and have been a huge help to me in dealing with my wacky tables and broken links - they definitely have some good pointers!

We started off the project by brainstorming themes and ideas. We came up with three - putting Aesop's fables to music and dance, music and dance in the 1960's, and learning foreign languages through music (actually, I added that last one after class when I was grasping at straws.) We went with the first theme, as it seemed that we could not only easily tie the subject into our Tech class learnings, but we could split the work load in a relatively even way. Kudos to Susan for volunteering to host the site on her public page - that means she is stuck with more coding than the rest of us,so Michi and I have tried to include the coding preset into our content when we share our work. A lot of our communication and idea sharing has been done over email.

To begin work on the Aesop project, we each chose a fable and created a page which includes an audio recording of the story, jpegs and sound clips to match the action, and a choreographed video. To make the pages, we drew upon our knowledge of embedding pictures and music, HTML tables, fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and more. Personally, I relied heavily on Wire Tap Pro and Resizr.com for this project - both great tools.

Working in groups has created the huge benefit of sharing resources and knowledge that we haven't covered in class. For example, Susan taught me about Taco, a completely free web design program which functions very much like Dreamweaver, but without the awkward set up process. In turn, I shared with Susan and Michi the link to Resizr.com, a fantastic free photoediting tool that does many of the same tasks as Photoshop, without the downloads and prompts to turn your trial Adobe program into a paid subscription. Also, today I showed the team how to make a quick recording in Garageband, an awesome tool for Mac users who want to create music and audio tracks.

It's really coming together, and I look forward to sharing our project in class tomorrow.