Microsoft Publisher Class 6: Term 1

Continuing on from where we left off last week, tonight’s session was about creating posters. Last week we did a handful of A4 sized posters for various events.   Care and attention was paid to the font style and colour of the posters.

Tonight, we worked on creating a long banner, and also a look at creating large posters.

Most people’s printers are A4, so what Microsoft Publisher does is print out your design in a tiled fashion. If you set the dimensions of your poster to be 1.5m x 1.0m then it is simply expanded over several sheets.

Rachel’s poster in class printed out on 16 pages, in the format of 4 x 4.  All she had to do was trim the overlap that Microsoft Publisher allowed, and stick the pages together. You could use scissors and selotape, or a guillotine and a glue stick – the choice is yours. The more time you spend on it the more professional looking the end result.  If you are printing a poster to be hung outside, you could even cover it with sticky-backed plastic, to make it rain proof.

Above, Rachel and Huw piece together a poster created in Microsoft Publisher. Its a time consuming process, but worth it in the end.

 

 

 

Here we see Rachel with the finished poster – impressive I’m sure you will agree!

PC Maintenance Class 5: Term 1

Many people these days have more than one computer at home, be it a laptop and a desktop computer. Sharing resources between these machines is a sensible thing to do. Gone are the days where we need to kit out each computer with it’s own printer. Networking is quite easy to setup.

Tonight we examined the components that you need, and how network configurations are generally setup and implimented.

• Network Card
• Bag of Network Cables  (Cat 5 or Cat 6)
• Ethernet Switch.

We discussed how you can you can attach a local resource such as a printer to one workstation and make it available to the other computers in the house.  However the one draw back to this setup is that Computer 1 with the printer attached to it must be on at all times.

Introducing wireless into the home is something that lots of people are doing, with laptops, netbooks and even mobile phones these days. The above screen shot shows a typical ‘Virgin Media’ setup, with a cable modem.

Ramping up the complexity, you can see from this simplified diagram, how a bigger network in a school or business might well be setup. In this diagram this network is centred around three file servers. In computing, a file server is a computer attached to a network that has the primary purpose of providing a location for shared disk access, i.e. shared storage of computer files (such as documents, sound files, photographs, movies, images, databases, etc.)

Wireless broadband allows you to get online anywhere in your home without having to run wires around the house and means that the whole family can get online at the same time. But before you start surfing the web in your back yard, make sure your network is safe and secure.

When you set up a wireless network in your house, the broadband signal is sent out from your router - it’s no longer necessary to physically connect your computer to your modem using an ethernet cable, and your network is no longer contained by the walls of your house. While this is great for you, it creates a whole new set of security challenges; protecting your wireless network is essential if you want to keep your connection private and hacker-free.

Download tonight’s presentation (in Adobe PDF format)  – Networking Presentation.

Digital Camera Masterclass Class 5: Term 1

One or two not in tonight, but I guess that’s to be expected because the weather was quite wild, but more so because tonight was the deadline for the Photo Marathon Trial project was due.  A few weeks back I had set a project based on the Cardiff Photo Marathon that was run back in June. The thinking behind this, would be to give the students some practice, ready for perhaps entering the real thing next year.

The proper photo-marathon you are given the day to take the 12 photographs based on a list of topics, and they must be handed in in the order in which the words were given. No editing, just the original pictures.  . The words were: Identity, Fresh, Reflection, Icon, Tasty, Old and the New, On the Move, Stop, Upside Down, One of a Kind, Noise and The End.   Have a look through the gallery below, at some of the pictures, some of the students had taken.

		“Photo Marathon” VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Well done to those that brought their pictures in, and hopefully we’ll get some late entrants to which I can add to this gallery.

For the remainder of the class, we looked at the new features in Paint Shop Pro X2. We had a look at the Make-over tools, such as the suntan brush, the tooth whitener, and the blemish remover. We also drew parallels between all versions of Paint Shop Pro, demonstrating how, no matter what version of the software, it still looked the same. This means if you learnt how to use version 7, then adapting to version 12 would be no problem. The tools are in the same place, the menus are the same, extra functionality simply gets added. That’s one of the really nice things about the product, in that you dont have to relearn the application when a new release is made available.

 

The is retail packaging for the current version of Corel’s Paint Shop Pro X3.  It generally retails for around about £44 from www.amazon.com that’s a saving of 44% off the standard £79.99 recommended retail price.

Microsoft Publisher Class 5: Term 1

A poster is any piece of printed paper designed to be attached to a wall or vertical surface. Typically posters include both textual and graphic elements, although a poster may be either wholly graphical or wholly text. Posters are designed to be both eye-catching and convey information. Posters may be used for many purposes. They are a frequent tool of advertisers (particularly of events, musicians and films),propagandists, protestors and other groups trying to communicate a message. Posters are also used for reproductions of artwork, particularly famous works, and are generally low-cost compared to original artwork. Another type of poster is the educational poster, which may be about a particular subject for educational purposes.

Many people also collect and sell posters, and some famous posters have become quite valuable. Collectors' posters and vintage posters are usually framed and matted. Posters may be any size.

This is where Publisher excels itself, so therefore tonight’s class was all about creating posters!  Bet you didn’t see that coming!

 

I set a few exercises, enough to keep the best of students going. The first exercise was to create 5 posters, A4 in size. The first was a Circus Poster, the second was a Warning Sign, the third was a Birthday Poster, then one for a  ‘For Sale’ poster, then finally a School Sports Day. Each of the posters are different in content, and the design chosen for each should reflect that in terms of the colours, and fonts that are chosen.

We ran out of time in this session, but we will continue the exercise next week, where we  will look at banners and large scale posters!