General day to day activities

We still start each school day with a warm up game. The game is either lead by Rukia, Salama, Mbarak or one of the students. This morning, one of the students had the following idea: one student writes any word on a piece of paper and then selects another student to form a new word from the last letter of the first word. This was quick and easy warm up game without too much thinking… but after yesterday’s class on Dreamweaver, it was a good thing to relax the mind a bit.

In class the students were explained the meaning of a grid and were then shown how to make a grid with Photoshop. After having learnt this, the students were divided into groups and had to upload their own pictures to the computer and make a grid. After having finished, it was time for each group to present their findings, followed by a general discussion about the in’s, out’s and uses of grids.

So finally we are moving on to Adobe Dreamweaver. This program will give the students a means of creating and editing websites. We started with a lecture on the history of Dreamweaver, and then gave out the definition of the software package. Rukia showed them some of the main tools which are used for making a website. She also showed them how to use note pad when editing web pages, and she gave them the assignment to make a website by using purely the note pad program. This was probably the most difficult lesson until now, and we will need a lot more practice in the weeks to come. Nothing good comes easy :)

This morning the students started with the following warm up game: the students will be answering questions on the past Dreamweaver lesson… so we took a piece of paper and wrote down some questions, which we then mixed up and spread over the floor. Every student had to take one piece of paper and had to give a suitable answer.

Then the students learned how to slice a Photoshop document, to make it ready for editing with Dreamweaver, which took a large portion of the day.

Today’s warm up had each student take a spoon from the kitchenette, put it in his or her mouth, place a lemon in it walk around the class without dropping the lemon. Of course some were better than others, and we had a great big laugh doing this.

After the warm up Rukia came to the class and gave out the next introduction to the website slicing lessons. She used one computer to show them an example on how to slice a page, after which she gave the students an assignment to slice their own pages. Then we talked about using table and links and pictures and text and color and all the different properties of each of these tools. No easy task, of course, but I think the students are doing great.

Keep on going, guys! All I can say is that I am proud of your work...

Guy