Working with Flash 8

The second project students do in my class is to use Flash to create an animated Ad Banner. I stat by showing them some examples of what can be done with Flash, including some animated movies and professionally developed ad banners.

We stared with several of Adobe's tutorials. Wow. I found out that there have been a lot of changes between Flash 4, Flash MX, and Flash 8. The first tutorial I chose was really simple, but the second proved somewhat difficult to follow. It was creating a flexible messaging area (fma) for a restuarant. The end poduct looked pretty cool, but I don't know if the learning was very helpful. It wasn't obvious why they were doing all of the steps in setting up the slides until the very end.

I tried to break up the tutorials with a few mini-lessons to show students how to import clip art and do tweening. I thought that my motion tweening examples went pretty well. My attempt to do a simple ad banner with a shape tween totally flopped. I was pretty embarrassed to not be able to get the word "Sun" to morph into a circle that looked like the sun.

I redeemed myself the next day, but only after searching lots of on-line resources for help. I found out that symbols and grouped objects can't be shape tweened. Text has to be converted to static text and broken apart TWICE before the letter shapes can be morphed into another word or shape. With motion tweens it is usually a good idea to convert objects to symbols, but this is something NOT to do when you make a shape tween.

Once again, I'm finding that my students are pretty creative folks. They are staring to come up with some pretty cool ideas for their banners. Now I have the challenge of helping them make their ideas take shape into animated banners. It really helps when they have sketched out a storyboard showing what they want to do with their banner.

Creating Portfolios

Our first project in the course is to create personal portfolio templates.

My students develop a basic website as a portfolio for showcasing the Graphic Design and Multimedia projects that they develop in the class. The last time I taught this class, I had them set up a template in Dreamweaver using a tables layout. This time I am having everyone use external linked CSS stylesheets to control all the page formatting and layout for their template. This gives a lot of control, but its a deeper learning curve than using HTML tags to set the appearance.

I have learned some great things from my students. Collectively, they have a tremendous amount of knowledge and skills, and they are enthusiastic about developing their projects. I now know about the shortcut keys for controlling font size in Firefox (hold down CTRL while scrolling the wheel). I learened that there are firefox add-ins for viewing and editing css styles, and there is a color picker add-in for selecting the exact hex code for any pixel on a web page. I also learned that the newest version of Dreamweaver is much better about editing css styles, but it has a much different layout than the older versions with which I am more familiar.

My students are very good at following complex oral directions as I show them how to perform tasks using the multimedia projector.

I am really excited about teaching this class this semester, but I have my work cut out in learing how to do a lot of things differently.

About My Journal

This journal is to share my reflections about what I'm learning as I teach a Graphic Design and Multimedia course at North Pole High School.