6/30 - Monday Travel & Scavenger Hunt

The kids finished up their travel brochures today! Here is a sample of students inserting themselves into photographs from around the world!

Then, they spent the rest of the day having a photo-scavenger hunt.The PNG Mentors give the students a list of clues and it's up to the students to figure out the clues, take a picture of the item indicated by the clue and then bring it back to the PNG lab and assemble a PowerPoint Slideshow of all the answers!

6/26 - Thursday World Travelers cont'd

This time it was too hot to go outside, but once again that didn't stop our Tuesday/Thursday PNG students from traveling the world thanks to the magical magic of the Internet! Magical!

Here are some of the destinations of our globetrotters:

Sam - Rio De Janeiro
Mario - San Francisco
Shannon - London
Joselyn - Tokyo, Japan
David R. - Paris, France
David A. - Madrid, Spain
Kyle - Beijing, China
Alex - New York, New York


Awesome!

6/25 - Wednesday World Travelers

It was a rainy day today, but the PNG kids were still able to travel the world thanks to the magic of the Internet! Magical!

Jet-setting for the weekend, the students found airfare, a hotel, entertainment and restaurants at their destination of choice.

These lucky globe trotters had 2 nights, 3 days and $10,000 (!!!). When they were finished they made a brochure showing the different places they went to and the things they did while they were there.

This is one of the biggest projects the PNG students have set out on, so it will be finished up next time.

In the meantime, I wouldn't be surprised if these kids came home with jet lag and complaining about the new checked baggage fee.

6/24 - Tuesday - Photoshop Collages cont'd

It's time to decide which class has the ultimate Photoshop skillz? The Monday/Wednesday class already posted their work, so check out the work of the Tuesday/Thursday class and judge for yourself!

Monday 6/23 - Photoshop Collage

The Monday class used the digital cameras to take photos of themselves and then used Photoshop to create collages and make crazy edits. Here's a look at some of their handy work. Some of these kids are becoming serious Photoshop experts!

Thursday 6/19 - Photo-tastic!

Cameras. It doesn't matter what else we did today because all anyone wanted to do today was play with the digital cameras.

I have to say that I'm pretty jealous of "these kids today". Back in my day, if you were lucky enough to get the camera from mom or dad you only got to take 2 or 3 pictures before they took it back from you said you were wasting film.

Now, these guys can snap away to their heart's content and delete whatever doesn't look good.

The kids took all kinds of pictures today and when they were finished they brought them into Photoshop Elements and did some crazy photo manipulation to them.

Wednesday 6/18 @ PNG

Today we all said hello to our newest Mentor, Chris!

In class the PNG students beefed up their typing skills. By the time the semester is over they're all going to be expert typers... if they can remember to stay on the homerow!

Next they looked up some information on their dream jobs. We found information on hotjobs.com and looked up statistics and information on what they wanted to do for a career. It was surprising to see that no one wants to be a marine biologist anymore. That seemed to be the career of choice for middle school kids back in my day. No one chose librarians either... interesting.
Next we played with an animation program called Pivot Man, a pretty simple but pretty cool little program that makes a little animated dude go crazy.

PNG Double Dose!

Today was the first day of PNG again, but this time for a whole new group of kids! We had such a demand for Project Next Generation that we split our students into two groups.

We had the first meeting of the Tuesday/Thursday group and we had a lot of fun.

It was another busy day and after the students introduced themselves we played Typershark, played an Internet search game, study our potential career paths :) and played around in Photoshop!

Not bad for the first day!

Summer Session Has Begun!

Project Next Generation at Elmwood Park Public Library has officially kicked off the Summer Session!

Demand for PNG was so high that we split into two classes!  This was the first meeting of our Monday/Wednesday class and we have so many students that some are actually sharing our brand new computers!

Today we introduced ourselves, warmed up our typing skills, took a tour of the Earth with Google Earth and generally just had a great time.