First class at Inkley's

Today I took my first class at Inkleys. It was the "Introduction to Digital" class. Going in to the class, I kind of thought that I might already know a lot about the content and might not learn very much, but since I teach Beginning Digital Camera classes for teachers, I still wanted to take the class to see how the instructor taught the class and also to see if I could still pick up a tip or two that I could implement into my own classes. I was pleasantly surprised with the class, the way it was taught and also with the things I learned.

First of all, the class was taught primarily through a PowerPoint slideshow and it was arranged in a very logical and easy to understand format. I liked the color scheme of the slideshow, black background with white and yellow text, and also the way different concepts were demonstrated through the use of pictures, shapes, etc. I definitely picked up a few ideas that I think I will implement into my own classes. The instructor, Dave, has been teaching these classes for a couple of years and he also seemed to be very knowlegeable about the subject matter.

A new tip I picked up pertained to the aspect ratio of the pictures taken with digital cameras in relation to the aspect ratio of printed pictures. Most point and shoot digital cameras take pictures in a 4:3 ratio and digital SLR cameras take pictures in a 3:2 ratio. This aspect ratio is different from the aspect ratio for printed pictures. What this ultimately means, is that pictures that are sent to a photo lab to be printed will usually come back with part of the picture cut off. In the Photo Editing classes that I teach, I teach teachers how to make compensations for their printed pictures by cropping them first to the desired printed size before sending them off to be printed, so that the pictures that come back are what they want. It was nice to learn a little about aspect ratio so that I can explain this concept better to the teachers in my classes.