Wednesday 24 October 2012

Yr8 Logo + Brochure

What goes in to a good logo? It must be easily recognisable from a distance and stand out when placed on colourful backgrounds (packaging, posters etc).
That means:
  • a simple graphic design
  • using few colours (2 or 3 usually)
  • the company/brand name should be short too: 1, 2, maybe 3 words
  • the brand name is part of the logo; the font used is very important
You can follow the PowerPoint below to learn more about logos. Once you have you need to create a snappy company name (your business is fixing, mending, improving, transforming photos - you can use your name, txt-style spelling, words linked to photography or improvment/change ...).
Every business needs a good slogan too - as Tesco plc says, Every Little Helps...
Once you've done that you can follow the instructions in how to use Photoshop tools to create a great company logo.
Make sure you save, and keep saving, your Photoshop work - any computer can crash. Press Ctrl+S every time you've made a major change you're happy with.
GuessLogos DB Compressed

Remember: Make sure you save, and keep saving, your Photoshop work - any computer can crash. Press Ctrl+S every time you've made a major change you're happy with.


Your brochure needs to feature certain key details - you could do your own research, looking at examples, but if there isn't enough time you can find a list of the key details you need to include in the document below. This also has instructions on how to create a 6-panel leaflet in Publisher.


Don't forget which panel will end up as the front, back, inside ... use this document as a quick reference:

Think about background colours, and take care with your font choices; experiment with text effects too: you can make shapes with words.

Friday 19 October 2012

Yr 7: EXCEL working with formulas

For this lesson you will be learning how to make Excel do the hard work for you and make calculations - much quicker than manually working out sums in your head or by calculator and then typing them in!

First, open up both MyDocs and My Computer. Resize and reposition both so you can drag files from the curriculum share / ICT / KS3 / Yr7 folder to your own ICT folder.
I've opened BOTH My Docs AND My Computer. I repositioned AND resized both windows so I'm able to drag and drop files from the curriculum share ICT folder into my own ICT folder.
In MyDocs open up your ICT folder and if you haven't already got a folder called SPREADSHEETS then click FILE > NEW FOLDER and name this.
Navigate to the usual place in My Computer. In ICT / Yr 7 find and open the MODELLING folder. Go into LESSON 1.
Drag the Excel file Zoo Activity and drop it into your own ICT/Spreadsheets folder. Do not open the file yet.

YOU NOW HAVE UP TO 5 MINUTES TO COMPLETE THE ZOO ACTIVITY WORD DOCUMENT BY HAND, USING MENTAL ARITHMETIC OR A CALCULATOR.

tbc

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Passwords and the hackers

It is written for an adult audience, but there is plenty of information in the article copied in below (click on read more to read the full piece) about how computer hackers are constantly working to crack our passwords - and why we do need complicated passwords to keep our personal information and files safe!
(Link for the article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/oct/05/online-security-passwords-tricks-hacking)

Online passwords: keep it complicated

By now, you probably have about 20 different passwords you're struggling to remember. There must be an easier way. How do you stay one step ahead of the hackers – and still stay sane?
passwords illustration
This word cloud shows the most commonly used passwords, with greater prominence given to those used most frequently. Published in InformationWeek BYTE 'Top 5 Password Managers'. Dazzlepod. Disclosure Project, dazzlepod.com/disclosure/
Let me hazard a wild guess: the system of passwords you use on the internet – for accessing online banking, email, shopping sites, Twitter and Facebook accounts – is a mess. You know perfectly well what you ought to be doing: for each site you visit, you should be choosing a different, complex sequence of letters, numbers and symbols, and then memorising it. (That's rule number one of the conventional wisdom on passwords: never, ever write them down.) But you don't do this, because you weren't blessed with a brain that's capable of such feats. So instead you use the same familiar words for every site – your dog's name, the name of your street – with occasional ingenious permutations, such as adding "123" at the end. Or maybe you do try to follow the rules, in which case you're probably constantly getting locked out of your bank account or trying to remember the answers to various absurd security questions. ("What was your favourite sport as a child?" I'm now asked, though my real favourite sport was finding ways to dodge PE. One question at the iTunes Store asks users to nominate their "least favourite car".) And things are getting worse: these days, you find yourself forced to choose passwords with both upper- and lower-case letters, and what normal human being can remember multiple combinations of those? Not you, that's for sure.
One reason not to feel too guilty about your bad password behaviour is that it seems to be almost universal. Last month, an analysis of leaked pin numbers revealed that about one in 10 of us uses "1234"; a recent security breach at Yahoo showed that thousands of users' passwords were either "password", "welcome", "123456" or "ninja".