Monday, April 16, 2012

Photoshop

Photoshop is an extremely popular and widely used computer program. One place that it can be used is in the classroom.

I had personally never used Photoshop before, so almost everything was new to me. The program offered a host of tools that I had never used on any other type of software. An especially interesting and unique feature were the filters, which allowed for a host of different effects to be made on an original picture. It was also the first time that I had the experience of shaving a picture for use on the web.

I would certainly consider using Photoshop to make classroom materials. The variety of features allows for the creation of exciting and eye-catching classroom graphics and decorations that would stand out from the generic-looking graphics found in most classrooms. Furthermore, graphics could be created for use on a personal teacher web site or to be sent home to parents using the "Save for Web & Devices" feature.

This project has taught me a lot about using images on the web. I learned how to make images the correct size and resolution so that it will be able to be viewed on the Internet. This was an important lesson to learn now, rather than when I am teaching and have issues putting images on the web. In a more general sense, this project also taught me about all of the incredible things that can be done to images before they are uploaded to the Internet.

I believe that it would be useful to teach Photoshop in the school system, but only in art related classes. Students who are interested in the arts can get a great deal of use out of the features that the program offers. It would be especially useful for photography-related classes, as the program is based around editing photos.While Photoshop can be applied to other disciplines, the amount of class time that would be required to teach students how to use it would far outweigh the benefits. There are simpler and quicker-to-teach programs that students could use to make the simple graphics that most other disciplines would require students to make.