Moving right along

Hi. Just an intro for the new vistas, I've been working on developing and starting a youth media program at the public access center in Cincinnati. It started off slow and bit discouraging but it's starting to gain speed and so on.

Last Wed, I started teaching a video production/media literacy class for a group of high school students from a charter school. This week would have been week number two, but Cincinnati had a snow emergency on Tues and Wed which also meant a snow day! (the city shut down early, if that's possible because of six inches of snow, people freak out with even the mention of snow around here....). Anyways, I'm basing this class off the Youth Channel's PSA/documentary curriculum, available on their website www.youthchannel.org . It's my first real teaching experience. And it's not so bad so far, though I did accidentally say shit, which they thought was a riot.

I've been getting calls from YMCA, afterschool programs, and youth-job training programs about doing some workshops. I guess it's just been a matter of talking to people about what I do here and accomodating to their needs, times, and desired outcomes.

Also recently established is our 'youth channel' called the Youth Media Block, shown on our educational access channel tuesdays and thursdays in three blocks of time - 4-6 (for the afterschool crowd), 8-10 (primetime for the university's broadcast of their news and now we're getting cinci schools to submit their highschool games) and an afterhours block midnight-2am for the 'adultish' content. I've signed up for the NYMAP- youth video exchange network that Danielle has mentioned so that I can get a stream of content from other access centers. We'll be making and sharing some productions out of the 'nati soon.

Oh - here's 2 tutorials I put together for my Saturday program - Youth Media Lab. Ummm. yah. One tutorial is a brief intro to the mac, about the desktop, where to find applications and and different view modes. It's pretty basic. I'll be expanding it soon. The other one is an activity using Photoshop Elements, or you can use Photoshop. If you have the newest macs with photobooth, it encorporates that but is not necessary. Feel free to alter as you see fit. I'm working on an iMovie tutorial... . It seems i can only upload the photoshop one right now. the other one is too large because of the pictures. if you're interested in the other one, email me.

Comment from Rebecca White on February 9, 2007 - 7:06pm

Maybe you know about this, but there's a button to compress the pictures in a Word (or Powerpoint) document on the "picture" toolbar (it shows up when you click on a picture, or when you right-click a picture and tell it to show the toolbar). It looks like a box with arrows pointing in at the corners. Word tends to save as much info as possible about a picture, so this can really reduce the size; one of my recent documents with a single PNG went from 3MB to .5MB.