Thursday, March 26, 2015


I had another great experience at NCCE (Northwest Council of Computer Education) in Portland, Oregon. I presented two workshops as follows:

The first workshop I presented was Infographics using Adobe Illustrator.  This was a well attended workshop. Joe Dockery who teaches digital arts courses at Mount Si High School in the Snoqualmie Valley School District, Washington, helped me out.

 I was sandwiched between his two workshops, Intro to Adobe Premiere Elements 12 and Special Effects with Adobe Premiere Elements 12. It worked out great. I helped him out with some of his Intro workshop and all of his Special Effects workshop. Joe's workshops are always great. I always learn something new. Adobe Premiere Elements has really changed over the years. There is so much you can do with this software. It is great for Title 1 schools that particpated in the ConnectEd Adobe software program

There were many of the same teachers in Joe's first workshop as were in his second workshop. There was even some overlap with students in my Illustrator workshop.

This was a great first day. I was able to have dinner that night with several Sentinel High School teachers and the wonderful, Beyond the Chalk guys, Jeff Crews and Dean Phillips. We ended up taking the train to downtown Portland and eating at Jakes, a wonderful seafood restaurant. Jeff and Dean treated the Sentinel teachers to dinner, which was very nice of them! Great food - great company!



Flying your Video to New Places

The next day I had the opportunity to go to Joe Dockery's one hour session called Flying your Video to New Places which was all about Aerial Video/Photography in education. It was a great session. I have been thinking about doing this over the last year and he has already been using it in his school. He has developed training for the students and curriculum. He will also be teaching a 6 hour workshop for teachers featuring tips and tricks he learned in his first year of flying and filming with the DJI Phantom Quadcopter. He shared some of his experiences with  us and demonstrated his Quadcopter to the teachers in the session.


Here is a shot of us from the quadcopter.


3D Prnting using Adobe Photoshop







The next day, I taught another workshop - 3D Printing using Photoshop. I will be teaching this same workshop (only three hours instead of two hours) at ISTE in Philadelphia, PA, later this summer. It was great to hear how other teachers are using 3D printing in their curriculum. I shared some of the curriculum that I teach in Graphic Design 2 at Sentinel High School.







It is really amazing how fast technology is changing and how the possibilties change along with the advancement of technology. It really is an exciting time in education to be able to help students discover what they are interested in and what the possibilties could be.