From the desk of Mr. Walters

Even if you know nothing about design! Designed in Canva... in 1 minute. Okay, graphic design is a classically snobbish topic in most of our minds, and historically most of our students really had little opportunity to experience it or interact with it. Today, we live in a visual landscape that is constantly getting more competitive. Everyone has a connected device, including most of our students. They see great design all day on web sites, apps, user interfaces, advertisements, and even E-cards from their middle school bae. The visual elements of most of our classrooms, though, from educational / inspirational posters to handouts to our Power Point Presentations (do people still use Power Point to make presentations?) look like amateurish garbage made by a well meaning but under-skilled octogenarian trying to design a bake sale flier for the local Rotary club. We can get away with die cuts, glitter, and Karen's Kids clip art until about fourth grade. Soon, though, kids are...

Thank you Karen Kavett ! Finally I have a generally non-abrasive and intelligent way to share this with colleagues and students! I've had to re-post these vids from Youtube to Schooltube so they can be viewed in my building. I'll leave the rest up to Karen... Comic Sans   Papyrus  

Good examples of great design that have me stoked this week. In the constant effort to improve my own work and provide great examples for students, I find myself often on the look out for good design examples.  I’ll be giving a shout-out to everything from my church’s new web site to the new Themes and Styles available in MS Word of all places. LWCC York's new FAQ page http://www.lwccyork.com/pages/page.asp?page_id=70814 The sheer brilliance here comes from the amazing use of awkward silence.  Just click on the page and enjoy for 2 or 3 minutes.  This isn't simply a brilliant concept rendered with great design and amazing flash coding, it's also a great example of fabulous video editing. Wow, that's a lot of positive adjectives... I hope I have some left for the rest.

Wow... so I haven't posted for awhile, and I'm beginning attribute this to my lack of inspiration for one singular coherent topic to write about.  Of course, I also have so many topics I'd like to talk about that the task of covering them all seems monumental. Additionally, I'm a bit unmotivated by the readership stats I've seen since moving here from Edublogs .  My blog at Edublogs had 100's of hits per day from all over the world.  I moved to Wordpress essentially because Edublogs took on ridiculously un-blog-like advertising practices to try to cover costs.  I feel that I am no longer accessible by the education community, but at least all the links in my posts are MY links and not some advertiser's links. Today's "Miscellaneous Monday Mash-up" is really an attempt to run through a quick list of those things on my mind for this coming week, and whether or not any or all of these topics become full-grown posts depends largely upon my week. To...