Today I spent the day at Richardson Bates House Museum with the School Librarians from our School Library Services Communication Coordinators group. Our meeting was held at the Richardson Bates House Museum to learn about this great place and all the resources it offers in regards to Oswego County.
We took a tour of the house and all the great architectural features and discussed the history of the house and the family that had lived there. Also included in the house is a great section on the history of Oswego County with many artifacts of the area on display.
We had the opportunity to talk with Kelly Jordal, Public Information Officer for Oswego County Tourism. Each school library was given a copy of The History of Oswego County New York 1816 - 2016. I will add this book to our CiTi Library Collection.
We also spent time reviewing the available educational resources with Stacey Pope, Educational Consultant for the Oswego County Historical Society. The historical society has many great resources to share with educators and students. You can reach out to them and they are working on making the educational resources available in a digital format. They will keep us updated on this progress.
Stop by the library to take a peek at our copy of the book. It will be on display for two weeks and then it will be available for check out.
Green Screens are a great way to enhance photos for almost any purpose. I recently wrote about creating READ Bookmarks (ala.org) and I have completed this with one class. The students kept popping in the library asking when their bookmarks would be ready. I was excited by this response. I also surprised them with an 8x10 of their images to take home to share with their families.
Still Images:
To expand on this concept I had an elementary class record their speeches on "Why it is important to vote". They did this in front of a green screen. Then in the library the students video allowed us to grab a screen shot of their best pose. To this we added a background of the White House Press Room and added a quote from their speech. Here is a link the PSD file with all the layers to work with White House Podium Speech You will just need to add your own student to replace the mannequin in the file. This file can be downloaded and copied to your own Google Drive. This was created using Photoshop CS6 but can be used in Pixlr Editor.
These are hanging in their classroom and one copy went home to share with their families.
Here is a video of how to work with Photoshop CS6 & Green Screen Photos
Videos:
The next step I took was to Green Screen the videos themselves. This was more challenging since I did not take the videos and had to deal with what the teacher gave me. To edit the video I used Camtasia. I also tried Adobe After Effects CC 2017 but ran into many issues and found it not student friendly. Camtasia is the best and most student friendly video editor that I have found. I had 7 videos completed in less than 10 Minutes! Here is one of the videos.
After this experience with the videos I have these suggestions:
1. Mount the camera or cell phone somewhere!
2. Make sure the Green Screen covers the entire background!
3. Use Camtasia's screen grab to get my still image next time.
4. Set up a room that is quiet to do the recording.
Now that I have found a video editor that is student friendly I will have the students do the video editing. Photoshop is still difficult to work with at times but it is possible for students to do this as well.
We had the opportunity to talk with Kelly Jordal, Public Information Officer for Oswego County Tourism. Each school library was given a copy of The History of Oswego County New York 1816 - 2016. I will add this book to our CiTi Library Collection. 
