Independent Learning Project Poster

Creating this poster was actually really hard!  This week we took engagement pictures.  I don’t share this in the graphic, but what I learned is that you don’t need to spend money on a photographer for engagement pictures.  My mom did these and I think they turned out well — well enough that I personally wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between these and professional ones.  Last time that I posted about my independent learning project I complained a lot (sorry) about how everything is so expensive.  So, I decided to try to be somewhat proactive about it and designed a little experiment: If my mom tried to take some pictures, all that we would be out of if they ended up unusable would be some time and effort.  Since my mom who has absolutely no professional picture taking background (honestly, she can hardly use a camera) could get decent shots, I decided that I won’t spend half my budget on a professional photographer for the wedding.  I have a cousin who I would consider a semi-pro (she’s taken a few classes on it and has done family pictures for family and friends).  This weekend I’m going to see her and ask her if she would take our wedding pictures.  If she says that she can’t then I’ll be back to the drawing board, but again, I think I can find someone like her who can take decent pictures for a decent price.

To make the poster (which I may or may not use — with slight alterations — for my save the dates) I used Canva.  At first I was slightly frustrated with the program.  I didn’t think that I would because Karen Jensen’s article on it (http://bit.ly/1DBnXkC) made it sound incredibly simple to use.  But I had a difficult time adding my pictures to the poster and I could not at all figure out how to move them or resize them.  Finally, after about an hour of trying, retrying, and re-retrying, I got the final product.  Now that I know what I’m doing, I think I will use it again for future projects and have my students use it in the classroom.  How fun would it be to have them create a poster for a book using this program?  Another program I’d like to try is the Piktographia program.  The examples that Jensen gave (same article as above) were so much more interesting and creative than any graph I’ve every created before.  I’d like to use that program for students to visually show the plot of a book.  I can’t wait to see what you all have created and what your ideas for using these programs in the classroom are!