Summary

Our study group will benefit students through the addition of new curriculm from Dryden High School. Our Graphic Design course in Candor is relatively new and now includes lessons from a teacher who had been teaching for many years.
Our new Graphic Design Club has a collection of mini lessons to use to aquire skills on the new programs that are loaded on the computers in the computer lab and in the Art room.
We also have had precious time to get to know the new Mac in the Art room together. Three heads are better than one - usually!
The opportunity to participate in the Study Group has enlivened three spirited teachers and given us fuel to finish the school year.

Our Last :( Meeting

March 10, 2010
We saved our last meeting to get aquainted with the new Mac and programs that now live in the art room. Thanks to our Tech committee, Candor High School now has state of the art graphic capabilities. An Adobe suite which includes Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Photoshop is up and running on the new 27 inch Mac Computer. WOW. Our art students who are headed to college for Graphic Design will have experience that counts. The programs will take lots of time and effort to learn.

Update from Feb. 3 meeting, Wednesday

Today we worked on sorting through many binders/treasures of graphic design curriculum materials recently acquired from Dryden High School. All three study group members worked on sorting and making sense of the materials. They were all reorganized into new binders and folders and will be put to use as needed in the Candor High School Graphic Design curriculum. There were many great ideas and it was really refreshing to see a different perspecitve on the subject matter. It was an exciting day and we're so fortunate to have the lesson plans! Thanks Dianne!

February 8th Meeting

Today the group reviewed several ideas for lessons that seemed to be a good fit with the Graphic Design class. These topics included the following ideas and others that might not come out of my 'at home' brain:

• Have students pick occupations (several each) out of a hat and create a 'name' logo that displays there occupation.. i.e an architect, lawyer, teacher, coffee shop owner, etc


• students create business cards and letterhead for themselves that reveal interests that they may have


• students create business cards for other famous characters from movies/books that put them in a different light. i.e. Harry Potter working as a doctor, banker, etc.


• Flip Flop design with packaging design and construction


• design a holiday shopping bag for a store like Old Navy


• cd covers, book jackets, short story illustrations using English class projects and more..

After discussing changes or trying to see how they fit into our program, we investigated a Mac Book that was lent to me by my lovely daughter. :) Part of our goal is to upgrade the department computers to a unit that is actually being used in the computer labs of most colleges. While visiting colleges this summer we were constantly being reminded that Macs were the way to go. Students had their own and Graphic Design departments swore by them. We looked at as many features as we could figure out and looked forward to the day when they might be available for the students in our program. To close out the session today we discussed what topics we would like to investigate at our next get-together. sf

Meeting #2 - Web Site Management

The second meeting's topic was web page design and site management. After first going over a collection of notes on HTML and the basics of web design, which I try to teach in school to 11th and 12th graders, we went through a couple sample websites that I am involved with on my own time. These were reviewed just to show what the different levels of complexity could get you. To keep things on the basic side, I had set up a web site on RoadRunner's free website over the weekend which displayed some of my daughter's artwork. It was very simple to do - which therefore means you don't get to do a lot with it, but if you are looking for simple.. this was as simple as it gets. If you are a Roadrunner customer - simply follow the instructions after pointing your browser to http://home.rr.com. You will receive 50mb of space free. The downside to the site is the advertisements which take up 1/2 the page.. but free is always good!!

The group also put together some materials for our binders that we are creating as references for ourselves and for the kids. Dianne will be running the next meeting so I am sure there will be much more to write about next week! sf

Meeting Dates

January 21, 2010 First Meeting Leader = Dianne Lynn
January 26, 2010 Second Meeting Leader = Steve Frye
February 3, 2010 Third Meeting Leader = Jodi Riggs
February 8, 2010 Fourth Meeting Leader = Dianne Lynn
February 10, 2010 Fifth Meeting *last one* Leader = Steve Frye

designing graphic design

Jan 21st was our first meeting. We set up a schedule for future meetings and talked about what we each hoped to gain from our Study Group. Jodi Riggs will develop a Graphic Design curriculum for the class that she teaches at Candor High School. Steve Frye used to teach a web design class and is interested in an online school newspaper. Dianne Lynn and Steve Frye began a new Graphic Design Club this year and will put together a notebook for the club that includes "work orders", a sign-in sheet, and tutorials for programs available to our students who are not in Graphic Design class.