Creating a Timeline and Scanning a Photograph

Students will now plan out the timeline of a family member. Please download My Timeline Planning Worksheet.pdf and Creating a Timeline.pdf and have your students use them to plan the information for their timeline. At this point you can help them pull information from their interview in order to create their timeline. They can also include photographs of the family member. Using Appleworks or a similar drawing program, follow the steps below to create your timeline. If you do not have access to a drawing program or would like to generate the timeline on the Internet you can go to http://teach-nology.com/web_tools/materials/timelines/  and create a screen shot to be inserted into the PowerPoint presentation.

1) Launch Appleworks.

2) Choose the Drawing part of the program.

3) Go to File>Page Setup and change the Paper to US Letter and Page Orientation to Landscape. Click OK or press the Return key when done.

4) You will see a non-printing grid on the page. Each one of those increments is 1 inch x 1inch. This non-printing grid is to help you align elements on the page.

5) Click on the Line Tool. This tool allows you to draw a line. If you want to constrain it to a straight line, hold the Shift key down while you click and drag the mouse. You can use the grid as a way to measure the line. Remember each square is 1 inch x 1 inch.

6) Create the horizontal line first. When you are finished click off of the mouse.

7) Next you will create the vertical tick marks. Use the vertical dots on the non-printing grid as your guides. Once you've created one tick mark, move it or reposition it to where you want it to be in relationship to the horizontal line. Now go to Edit>Duplicate and the vertical line will be copied and placed the same distance from the second vertical line as the first. Continue using Edit>Duplicate to copy the vertical tick marks.

8) When you've finished arranging everything on your document, select the Arrow Tool in the Tool Palette and draw a marquee around the entire Timeline by holding the mouse button down and dragging around the items.

9) Once they are all selected, go to Arrange>Group. This groups all the items together so if they need to be relocated you can click on it and move it to the new location.

Typing with the Text Tool 12-point type is a font size that is generally large enough to read. Anything smaller may be difficult for some people to read. Typefaces vary in design. Some may be too ornate or decorative to read in a paragraph, but may look fine in a headline.

1) Using the Text Tool, click on the document page and begin typing your text. Highlight over the text and go to the Button Bar to select a typeface and a point size. A good rule of thumb is to see what is the longest line of text that you have in your rough layout and then choose a font and a font size.

2) If you want to use the Edit>Duplicate feature you can select the text and go to Edit>Duplicate and highlight over it to type in your new copy. This is a shortcut. Now you don't need to highlight over the text, choose a font and a type size.

Place a Title on your Timeline

1) When you type a headline it is usually not a full sentence. This is your chance to pick a whimsical or decorative typeface and use a larger point size.

2) You may even decide you want to use color in your document, add clip art or original drawings that have been scanned in, saved in graphics file format and imported into the timeline.

Scanning a Photograph

A scanner is a piece of hardware that is an important part of your computer. When you look at a photograph with a loop, you can see that it consists of continuous tone. If you don't have a loop, you can use a magnifying glass. You can also go to this website, http://computer.howstuffworks.com/
scanner.htm  to find out how a scanner works.

Each scanner has software to drive the scanner. Scanner software is referred to as a driver. A scanner cannot operate without a driver. A scanner is considered an input device because you are bringing a photograph into the computer by digitizing the information. A printer, on the other hand, is an output device because the printout of your document comes out of the printer. So there are input and output devices. A photograph is digitized into pixels. Please go to http://webopedia.com/TERM/
p/pixel.html for a broader explanation of a pixel.

Some questions to ask yourself before scanning your photograph.

1) Is your original photograph in fairly good shape? In other words, there are no scratch marks or torn edges or discolorations in the photograph to be scanned. (If there are you may need to do some color retouching with a program like Adobe Photo Elements or Adobe Photoshop. There are other retouching programs as well.)

2) Do the dimensions of your photograph fit well with your presentation? (If not, you will need to plan to crop it or resize it to fit your layout.)

3) Make sure you know if the scanner has a destination folder. If you scan, you want to make sure you know where the scanned image is going to be after the scanning process in order for you to access and use it in your document.

4) Do you need to scan the photograph in color, grayscale or black and white. Each one of these has different settings and you will need to choose this beforehand. Remember a color photograph has more information and will end up being a larger file after scanning than the same image in grayscale.

5) There are different file formats that you will want to know more about. They include TIFF, JPEG, PICT, EPS, GIF, PDF. You can learn more about these by going to www.webopedia.com  and typing in the acronyms above. TIFF stands for Tagged Image File Format and JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.

6) Decide what resolution you will need to scan in your photograph. As a rule of thumb you do not need more than 150 dpi or ppi if you are printing out to a deskjet printer. You will need 300 dpi if you are using the scans for a 4-color piece that will be printed professionally. For web graphics you can get by with 72 dpi. Remember the larger the resolution, the larger the file size.

7) Do you know how to use the scanner in your classroom? (Many manufacturers have tutorials on their website that show you how to scan with the computer model you purchased.) Go to www.scantips.com  for additional information on scanning.

To Scan

1) Launch the scanner software.

2) Open up the top of the scanner and place the original photograph face down on the glass.

3) Click the Preview button on the scanner. This will give you a preview of the photograph.

4) Next you will crop the photograph. Crop is a term used to select the part of the photograph you want to use in your presentation. After you crop your image can scan.

5) Now click the Scan button. When you scan, make sure you know where the photograph is scanning to so that you will be able to import it into your presentation.