First Class Predictions

Talking a look back at my notes for my impressions of the first day of class from last semester it seems that we did well in not losing what we had from it, people seemed more talkative by the end of class and understood that the class was going to be focusing around teaching applications. From the old bad list, it seems that we skipped a few of the things outlined on it for inclusion to clear up or stream line the process. The first point is the art server, however that has become a mostly non consequential point as it is longer a primary conduit for the class. The demo material was spot on with giving examples of what was expected and the last point of forcing Photoshop in to its default state was primarily solved by having everyone change it over to the same layout.

Given the change observed from this first day and what I would call a positive impact on the proficiency of the students in their first assignment and general ability with the OS (a lot less questions on basic functions) I would say that the new structure of what is presented and how seems to be effective so far.

On my predictions, keeping with this short project and short lecture style, where the students get in class time to practice what was shown prior, should result in an overall more coherent group on the established assignment goals and on the usage of the application. This group wormed up to Photoshop a lot quicker than the previous and I believe that’s entirely related to the presentation of the material (while more were familiar with it, those that weren’t were still following along quite well) given that Photoshop was the hardest getting student to understand in the previous semester, I feel that we will have little trouble moving through the rest of the applications (Dreamweaver/HTML and Finalcut Pro X).

The biggest potential hurdle to overcome that I see in the later applications falling on the file management aspects of it, as Finalcut is a hassle to move around with and Dreamweaver/HTML is very sensitive to the structure of the directory. If these two things can be well covered on day one of their introduction then there should be little to no problems later with files missing and things breaking.