Beth Cole and I left the hotel a little before eight in the morning. Our first workshop started at 8:30 a.m. I must have been more tired than I thought. As we left the hotel and started walking, I looked down and had to laugh. Beth has been giving me a hard time since she saw my suitcase. It was quite a bit larger than hers. Okay, so it was three times the size of hers. I like to give myself options should we say. Well I carefully picked out a red and black outfit to wear for today. When I looked down I had put on obviously brown shoes. Most people would say, "who really cares" or "who is going to really notice?" I brought three pair of shoes (brown, black and blue). The black shoes were for this outfit. Okay - so who really cares?
After a quick breakfast at Starbucks, Beth and I headed back to the Conference Center. Beth attended a workshop called Weaving the Web 2.0 Tools into the Curriculum presented by Patsy Lanclos. I attended the Digital Photo Graphic Novels with Adobe Photoshop presented by Joe Dockery. Beth shared her Google docs notes with me while I was in my workshop. As I was viewing her notes, while listening to Joe, I noticed that there did not appear any new links for information that I had not heard before. Beth began to communicate with me through Google docs and as suspected, she was very disappointed with the workshop.
(note for the future)
I enjoyed Joe's workshop, as usual. I was able to spend a little over two hours going through his tutorials and creating my own graphic novel pages. While I can't say I learned a whole lot of new techniques, I did learn a new way to put the techniques together. I also learned a few shortcuts (that I may have know before, but forgot about) that I will share with my students in Graphic Design 2. Comic books and graphic novels are very popular among students. I think students will find this graphic style to communicate very appealing. I think it is a great way to visually represent what students know or what to communicate. I think it is also more likely to catch a student's interest and a visual graphic containing key information can be easier for many students to remember.
I often struggle with coming up with group projects for students to work on in Graphic Design. I think that this would be a great way to combine team work, research, reading and writing skills woven into what I believe could be a highly motivating project with significant educational value.
I have taken many courses from Randy in the past. He has his own consulting company now, called Orwin Consulting. I spoke with him after the workshop and he mentioned two video conversion programs. Moyea, which is an open source program that you can download and Format Factory which is not open source but is freeware.
