Advice

For all of you who are taking Mrs.Belisle's Essential Computer Skills class during the 2010-2011 school year, I guarantee that you will get a lot out of it! Simply keep up with your work, listen in class, and put in effort and you will learn so much that will help you with other projects in the future! Mrs.Belisle is a great teacher and is very helpful! Ask questions if you need! Good luck :)

Classmate's Websites

I would say that my three favorite websites from my classmates are Teka, Ana, and Rory's. Teka's was just really well put together. I loved everything about it, especially the organization and graphics. I saw her working on it and she was putting so much effort into her graphics, using photoshop and creating her own images. I thought Ana's was really visually appealing. It was very balanced in terms of space and overall her site looked really nice. Rory's was really creative, specifically with his graphics. I liked how he created his own background by blending various pictures (I especially enjoyed the Fernando Torres one), and on the page about himself, had pictures of his cut-out head spread out across the background. It was a neat concept and only Rory could pull it off (yes, that is a compliment). Overall, I thought our whole class had some really good websites!!!

Website

Please visit my website www.cs.trinity.edu/~btammaro

I thought making the website was easier than I thought. There's definitely a lot that goes into it, and I can see how if you want a really professional website, it might be more difficult. For my website, I used Expression web and I really liked how it coded everything for you. I thought EW was pretty easy to use and didn't have too many complications. The page I'm most proud of would probably be the SPURS page because it's bright and has a lot of nice pictures on it. If I could've changed anything, I definitely would've made everything more creative, specifically the navigation bar. I didn't have too much time to work on it and make it really unique but if I ever create a website in the future, I would definitely put more time into it. I did put a good amount of effort into my site, but it didn't turn out as pretty as I wanted. My biggest technical design at first was hyperlinking because for some reason it wouldn't work. I had to have Brittney help me a lot with that. My biggest design challenge was probably making the navigation bar because there were so many possibilities. I will only show this site to the people in this class and maybe my family. There is always the possibility that I will create another website in the future, probably for my career.

My Pictures that Lie

I chose an action photo of Cristiano Ronaldo and decided to blend it with one of Pele. At first, it was a photo of Cristiano playing another team with two other players in the background so, using the clone stamp tool, I had to cover them up using the existing background. After that, I cut out Pele using the magnetic lasso tool and inserted him into the other picture. I then proceeded to strip the picture of a lot of its color, and hue and saturation. I also adjusted the lighting. By doing all of this, I was trying to give the picture a old look similar to those of the Nike and Gatorade advertisements.


I also added the title (which I added some effects to), "Battle of the Ages" because like any soccer fan knows, Pele is reguarded as the best soccer player of all time, and Christiano Ronaldo is arguably the best of his generation. Being a huge fan of Christiano Ronaldo, I would love to see this matchup, even though of course it would never happen. This photo manipulation is not harmful because as most people know, or can even see by the pictures, Pele is from the 1950-70s while Ronaldo is a current player.


One of the main points of the article I chose was that "it is not the technology that is at the heart of the photo manipulation controversy rather it is the ethics behind manipulation." I thought this was well said and makes a lot of sense because just because technology provides to resources to do so, it doesn't mean that it is morally right to manipulate an image.


Salvo, Suzanne. "True lies." Communication World 25.5 (2008): 26-30. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 14 Apr. 2010.

Importance of HTML Codes

It's vital that web designers to know use HTML codes because it's the platform of their profession. Even with all the new software and technology that basically does it for you, web designers should be able to know the basics. It's like drive because you've always had someone do it for you. Technology these days have caused society to get lazy because it provides them with resouces to either do things for them, or simply faster, better, and easier. It's important for web designers to know how to use HTML codes so they can easily fix any problems that occur that will require them to look over the codes to see what is wrong. That way, since they are familiar with the codes, they can easily identify and fix the problem.

Powerpoint Presentations

I think my two favorite powerpoint presentations were Teka and Glenn's because they were both very powerful. I loved the how beautiful Teka's presentation was, especially the tranquil music. Glenn was very passionate about his subject, and I thought the video was very creative. Both presentations had very interesting subject matter and gave me great insight into the topics of Terra Cotta Warriors and Philosophy. Overall, I think both presentations used graphics and transitions very well and took different approaches to the layout which were both very effective.