September 30-October 6

Organizational Skills

            I organized my time this week by bookmarking website tutorials on how to make calendars in Adobe Photoshop. I also found a website from WWF (World Wildlife Fund) that helps one calculate their own personal carbon footprint; I filed it carefully into my Personal Project folder in my list of bookmarks in my Internet browser. The URL is http://ecoguru.panda.org/#/intro. In addition, I joined the Photography Club at school so I could learn more about taking good photos for my calendar.

Communication

            I talked to my supervisor for some tips on how to make calendars in Photoshop because she was my Digital Art teacher last year (my classmates and I made art pieces using Photoshop). She did not give me any tips about it, but instead she told me to use Adobe InDesign, a program that I had never heard of, instead.

Information Literacy

            Initially I did not want to take my supervisor’s advice into account because of how much extra work it would be to go to the store and install Adobe InDesign, not to mention the amount of time it would take to learn how to use it. But then my laptop got a virus on it, so all of my files and programs had to be deleted because they got contaminated. This meant that I would have to bring my program disks to the store and have them re-installed. When I got to the store, I realized that I could just buy and install InDesign while my other programs were being installed. When I got home with my new programs, I opened InDesign and found that the tools were quite similar to Photoshop. This was a blessing because now I do not have to learn how to use all the features in the program; I already know about most of them. In addition, I tried out the website that calculates one’s carbon footprint. I am sad to say that I am currently using the energy and resources of 2.3 planets.

I learned to be more energy conscious and to watch what I eat, how much I recycle, what kind of transportation I use, the distance of the places I go on holiday, and how much energy I consume. What is good about the website is that it does not only tell one how much they are consuming, but also what they can do to consume less energy. This could be a good website to tell people about in my calendar because it helps them be aware of just how much of the earth’s resources they are consuming and how to consume less. As I mentioned before, I signed up for the Photography club at school, which meets on Mondays at lunchtime. So far there have been two meetings; I did not learn much at the first meeting because it was more of an introductory session and I skipped the second because I needed to take pictures of the Battle of the Bands (a band competition at school) for the school newspaper.