Some great tools for teaching TECH!

Below you will find links to an interesting EdTech blogger (Eric Curts) who discusses some handy tools for screencasting and world language fluency using several online apps, several of which are free. If you are a school librarian, these may be of special interest to you as a way to enhance your collaborative efforts with your colleagues and their students. These screencasting tools can also be used for demos in explaining search strategies, among other applications. Enjoy!

Great links:

http://www.controlaltachieve.com/2016/05/world-language-fluency-tools.html

http://www.controlaltachieve.com/2017/01/screencasting-activities.html

Brief Introduction to using Zotero Reference Manager

Zotero is one of those great reference managers that happens to be free and contains a lot of great features that will help you keep those resources organized. For a full list of features, compatible systems, and to download, visit https://www.zotero.org/. Just in case you wondering, Mendeley offers very similar features, but has a mobile app and a more robust online academic community. However, it's owned by Elsevier which is a private company (to my understanding) which to some people may not be a great thing. You know, privacy of information and data in the hands of the giant companies we all use but maybe fear. Elsevier also has a big hand in the academic publishing world, to the apprehension of Open Access advocates who feel academic publishing needs to be more accessible and free to as many people as possible. Zotero, for those of us who are fans of Open Source and Open Access, may be a better fit for you...

"Zotero is a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, and was initially funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. "

Screencast by Fernando Herranz.

Using the Exposure adjustment layer in Photoshop CC 2017

As I said in previous posts from this series, this screen-cast is for those students, teachers, and librarians looking to adjust their images and make improvements like exposure, color, brightness and contrast, etc. Adjustment layers are pretty easy to do and make your life simpler when you need to make quick adjustments yet want to maintain control of your images. Hope this video helps! Good luck!

Screencast by Fernando Herranz. 

How to use Adjustment Layers in Adobe Photoshop

This video will show you how to create adjustment layers in Adobe Photoshop CC 2017. Adjustment layers are very handy in helping us change things about an image like exposure, brightness, contrast, color, etc. The video is meant as a supplement to the previous video on creating Contact Sheets. This screencast was created on a Mac but the steps are very similar on the PC platform. Enjoy!

Screencast by Fernando Herranz. 

How to create a Contact Sheet using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop 2017

This video is for those students, teachers, and librarians that need to create a contact sheet of images to see a series of photos for a project, a yearbook, or an event and be able to compare them to each other. Like the good old days of film cameras, contact sheets were handy to be able to see your film negative exposures and be able to get an idea of what you did over several images at a glance. Now in the digital age, they're handy as well for the same reason and are MUCH easier to create!

Although this screencast was created on a Mac, the steps are very similar to what they would be on a PC. Also, even though I'm using Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CC 2017, the steps haven't changed much since possibly Adobe CS3 at the earliest. Enjoy!

Screencast by Fernando Herranz.