LHS IT Resources Blog

Heres some links to some free and challenging online games, great to give the brain a break from all that hard study!

Orange Line Game - test your drawing skills and reflexes
Online Basketball – play against others online
Gimme Friction -simple yet addictive
Launchball – science in a game
The Great Flu – simulator and an amazing game
Friv.com – a great collection of 250  free flash games (many suitable for whiteboards)
Doodle Defender – Draw your own spaceship and fly it around the page to blow up enemies
Y8.com – 96 pages of free flash games, quite the collection!

Like Facebook, but wish your information wasn’t so public?  Time to lock your settings down. Facebook doesn’t make this easy, however; features are constantly added and the default for each new one seems to favor transparency instead of privacy.

The result: there are hundreds of little changes you need to make to truly control where your information goes.

Enter “The (Very) Unofficial Facebook Privacy Manual”. This handy guide outlines everything you could ever want to know about locking down your privacy on Facebook, and a few things you probably didn’t even know you wanted to know.

If you use Facebook you should read this guide, if only to understand how public most of your information is.

This guide outlines a variety of things regarding Facebook privacy settings, including:

• Making sure a comment meant for your friends isn’t seen by co-workers
• Understanding what it means to upload content to Facebook
• Control whether others can check you in to certain locations
• Keeping your Facebook page off Google’s search results
• Blocking unwanted users from seeing your page
• Deleting your Facebook page completely, if it’s all just too much.

Thanks to MakeUseOf.com for the Guide and information.

Download The Unofficial Facebook Privacy Guide in .pdf format

Quizzer, our practise flash quiz application is back and living on a new server, so is now accessible both at school and home.
Use the link to the right, (or click here) then register an account and do as many practise quizzes as you like.

These tests are designed to reinforce and review concepts learned in class. At the moment only a few quizzes are available, more will be added soon.

For HSC VET students I’ve added a quiz with a few previous HSC questions to revise and test yourself
This is live now, have a go and let me know of anything you are still unsure of.

LHS staff, if you’d like to use the quiz application, please see Mr McGuinness at school for more information.
Advantages: include: students can access from home or school, write the test questions once and use over and over, test is self marking and you get a printout of all students scores, question and answer order is randomised for each student .
Disadvantages: Multiple choice and true/false questions only.

Often, we would like to download a youtube video to insert in a multimedia file or to play back later when we don’t have an internet connection. Here are 2 ways you can download a video clip fron youtube to use later:

1) If you use Firefox as your browser, get the free extension called Download Helper.  It offers to save any media found on a webpage including video, music, animations etc. For v ideo, it gives you a range of quality settings to download.

2) Go to Youtube and start playing the video you selected (works with any video). Look at your browser address bar above, it will start with  http://www.youtube.com. Click the address bar and insert the word kiss before the word youtube.. It should now look like http://www.kissyoutube.com(name of video). Press enter, it will prompt you for a small java control (say yes) and then offer a few different formats of the video to download. You can download high or standard definitions and even versions optimised for mobile devices.

Below are listed some useful copyright free help guides and cheat sheets for using common application and devices. Each is a .pdf file that can be viewed online, saved and printed.  They make for some useful supplementary class reading and an  easy to understand way to increase your IT knowledge.

Download Basic Guide to Photoshop – Part 1 – an introduction to Adobe Photoshop.
Download Basic Guide to Photoshop – Part 2 – an introduction to some of the common features and tools in Adobe Photoshop.
Download MS Word 2007 Guide – How to write Professional Documents and Reports using Microsoft Word 2007.
Download Google Guide – A quick reference for easier searching using Google.
Download Windows 7 Guide – An introduction to Windows 7, helpful  tips for newcomers and pros.
Download Windows Shortcuts – A reference sheet containing a list of useful Windows time saving keyboard shortcuts.
Download Build a Gaming PC - a how to, step by step guide on building a modern gaming PC.
Download Digital Photography – a great reference and guide to Digital Photography.
Download Guide to Internet Searching – tips on how to refine internet searches for better results.
Download Underground iPhone Guide – the unofficial guide to the iPhone.
Download Easy Guide to Computer Networks – a simple guide to networking basics.

Good Tutorial and Resource Sites for Photoshop

The following websites have some excellent tutorials and learning resources for Adobe Photoshop.
Note: some tutorial sites charge membership fees, all the sites listed here are completely FREE.

Adobe Home Page- the makers of Photoshop. Site has plenty of resources and tutorials.
Photoshop Tutorials at Good Tutorials.com
Photoshop Tutorials and free resources at Photoshop Roadmap
Photoshop Cafe for tutorials, free brushes and other resources.
Photoshop Essentials has some good tutorials.
Learn Photoshop at Photoshop Star.
Youtube has some excellent video tutorials for photoshop, just search the site for tutorial or photoshop
The Tutorial Kit has plenty of resources and tutorials.
Grafx Design.com for tutorials.
PSD Tuts – another good tutorial site.
Photoshop Lover for tutorials and resources
Photoshop Tutorials Blog
Photoshop Lab – tutorials and resources
Tutzor – Photoshop Tutorials
Phong – Photoshop and Graphic Design tutorials
The Russel Brown Show – Russel is a photoshop guru and his site has tutorials, information, podcasts and more.
Kaos Tutorials – Photoshop, Flash and HTML tutorials.

With more bandwidth,  faster speeds and greater access to Web 2.0 type applications and sites, it is now possible and easy to produce a lot of your multimedia online. There are hundreds of new sites popping up all the time. The ones listed below have all been used and tested for use in the classroom and at home.
Following are some of the more useful examples of this:

Xtranormal.com – if you can type you can make movies. An online multimedia site to create video and animations.
Prezi.com – create astonishing and moving presentations live and on the web. Get the hang of this and never use Powerpoint again.
280 Slides.com -  create an  online slideshow presentation, can be accessed from any web browser. Create beautiful presentations, access them from anywhere, and share them with the world.

Intro To Prezi – YouTube has some excellent prezi demos and tutorials.

With the portfolio function in Acrobat 9, you can combine documents and images from a wide variety of sources—including text documents, spreadsheets, graphic and image files, PowerPoint presentations, page-layout documents, and even CAD files—into a single, editable, searchable, compressed PDF portfolio. In a PDF portfolio each document can be viewed, edited, and a saved separately.

Its a great way to bundle up all your related files, pictures and notes from a subject into a single portable .pdf file.

Kuler.com – is a great Adobe Website to help you choose complimentary colour swatches for your media projects.

Tutorials: How to Create and Edit a Portfolio

Creating an Acrobat Portfolio – a tutorial from Layers Magazine
Some Sample Portfolios – from the Adobe website
Creating Electronic Portfolios with Acrobat – a pdf help file from Adobe
Sample Portfolios Gallery – from the Acrobat Users website
Create and Edit Acrobat Portfolios – from Adobe Help website
Customizing PDF Portfolio Layouts – from the pdf Developer Junkie website

YouTube Tutorial – Making a Portfolio using Acrobat

Current LHS Website Banner

We are running a new web banner design competition for the Lisarow High School Web Homepage.

Designs are to be saved preferably in jpg format and must be between 800-1000 pixels in width and no more than 150 pixels height.
Preferred background colour is black or a dark hue, see Mr McGuinness if you’d like a copy of the current background pattern to use in your design.
For further help or information, talk to Mr McGuinness, Mr Morrison or Mr Irvine at school.
Competition is open to all current LHS students.

Closing Date: the last week of Term 3, 2010.
Submit Entries: via email to  Mr McGuinness
Format: as a .jpeg OR if you use Photoshop Elements a .psd file is even better.   
Prize: a fully licensed copy of the new Adobe Design Premium CS5 !!!

Australian Catholic University is running a photography competiton for Yr 7-12 students. The PixelPrize competition provides students with an opportunity to develop their skills as photographers and have their work displayed in a public gallery. Their is also a $1000 first prize.

Students can enter a maximum of two photos for judging. They need to address the theme of community spirt through one of three categories: people, places and digital darkroom. For further details about the competition, including theme, categories and prizes, to view last years finalists and to submit entries, visit the website:
www.the pixelprize.com.au

Entries close on Friday 16th July, 2010.