Animated Step-by-Steps®

Monday, February 22, 2016

Creating Photo Faces for Personalizing Your ASbyS

As indicated in previous posts, you can, with a little bit of effort, personalize some of the ASbyS poems/songs/stories for your students by substituting their ‘photo faces’ for the illustrated faces in the purchased document.

When working as an AAC consultant, I have frequently started the school year creating ‘photo faces’ for each child in the early grades (PreK through 4). These digital ‘photo faces’ with their transparent backgrounds were primarily used to create the class page needed for various personal communication devices, but they also served ‘double duty’ in writing projects, crafts activities and yes … personalizing Animated Step-by-Steps™.

An ideal ‘photo face’ has a transparent background allowing it to be fully integrated with other graphics on a page. In a previous post you received information on how to use the change picture feature of PowerPoint to substitute photos of your students. This post will discuss the basic photo editing tools needed to create ‘photo faces’.

Take the pictures

First take a close up picture (head and shoulders) of every child in your class. Use your Smart Phone camera as you can easily email the photo(s) to your computer to more easily edit your images. Be sure to take the picture in front of a white/light wall. The solid white/light background makes it much easier to edit out the background of your photo. If you don’t have a white/light wall, tape a piece of white poster board on the wall behind the child’s head. If the child is in a wheelchair ask a colleague to hold the white poster board behind the child’s head while you take the picture.

Import the picture into a photo-editing program

On your computer, import the photo into a photo-editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Photoshop Elements (I’m sure there are other software programs that will work just as well). Most common photo editing programs have the tools you need: crop tool, magic wand and polygonal/lasso tool.

Crop the image

I like to crop the image first. This eliminates excess background information that needlessly increases your file size.

Select the background

Use the ‘magic wand’ tool to select the white background you wish to remove (a dashed line will appear around the selected area). If a click in the background only selects a portion of the area due to shadows, hold down the shift key and keep clicking additional areas until the entire background has been selected, then select delete to drop out the background. A gray-checkered pattern will appear; your background
is now transparent.

Remove the area under the chin

Use the polygonal lasso tool (circled in blue on toolbar) or the eraser tool to remove the area under the chin. When using the polygonal lasso tool you will be making a series of close clicks along the path you wish to select.

Save your final image as a .png, as this format maintains the transparent background.

I usually save the image at 150 dpi with a vertical size of 3”. Depending upon the project, this size gives me the flexibility of being able to enlarge the images considerably without too much degradation (pixelating) or reduce the image size in keeping with the size needed for my ASbyS personalization project.

Using PowerPoint

You can also use PowerPoint to drop out the background. Drag the cropped image on to a blank PowerPoint page. Select the Format Picture tab then choose the Remove Background option. A selection box will appear that should be adjusted to delineate the area that you wish to keep. The pink area denotes the area that will be deleted; the ‘non-pink’ area is the area that will be maintained. When you click back on the Remove background icon, it will remove the pink area.

These instructions might not be a perfect match for the photo-editing program or PowerPoint version that you will be using, but hopefully they can at least ‘point you in the right direction’, giving you a better idea of the types of tools to look for in your photo-editing program.

…’til the next post … (new posts every Monday)

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Monday, February 15, 2016

Personalizing Animated Step-by-Steps™ Made Easier!

If you are willing to devote the extra time, you can modify your Animated Step-by-Steps™ to include personal photos of your students. It’s a great way to heighten engagement.

I vividly remember the first time I used the interactive whiteboard to present a story that had been personalized with the photo faces of students in the class. I was richly rewarded with their squeals of sheer delight …. the question, “How did I get in the story? … and my personal favorite …. “ How you do dat?”

What child doesn’t like to see themselves in a starring role on either the big screen (interactive whiteboard) or the little screen (iPad)? The extra time needed to personalize a product is well worth the effort, but I am fully cognizant of the fact that it does require a fairly sophisticated understanding of PowerPoint to efficiently make the changes necessary for personalizing the product.

First you must change your .pps file (PowerPoint Show) into an editable .ppt file. This can easily be accomplished by re-typing its end designation, i.e., the letters following the period. Make a copy of your ASbyS files to be on the safe side.

As indicated above, simply click on the name of the file, then select just the pps letters that occur after the period in the name. Change these letters to ppt. This changes the file from a ‘show version’ to a ‘editable version’. If you have the more current version of the PowerPoint, I suggest you open this newly minted .ppt file from within PowerPoint. This will allow you save the file in the newer version of PowerPoint, i.e., the .pptx format. Under File on the PowerPoint menu bar, select Open, then navigate to your recently modified file.

If the file name is not showing you will need to change the default setting. Here are some general guidelines for both Mac and Windows:

For Mac

Click on your desktop to bring up the Finder menu

Click on the Finder (next to the apple icon in the upper left corner) in the menu bar

Select Preferences in the drop down menu.

Click on the Advanced Tab

Select the option Show all filename extensions

For Windows

Go to Startup button (bottom left of screen)

Choose Control Panel

Click on Appearance and Personalization

Select Folder Options

Click on View Tab in the dialog box

Uncheck the box that says Hide extensions for known file types (scroll down in list)

Click OK

Here’s the additional and perhaps most daunting challenge …

When you ungroup the existing face from the firefighter’s body … you lose the animation(s) that were previously created for that grouping. You must then substitute the face of your student for the existing face … group the new face to the old body … redo two animation(s) (sliding on to the page; sliding off of the page)…. and make sure the new animation(s) are correctly inserted back into the animation lineup for the page.

Yikes that’s a lot of meticulous work!

Is it possible to change out the photo face … without having to redo the animation sequence?

At long last … I’ve finally figured out how to do this!

Here’s how its done …

Select the grouped item (typically the body + face).
Click a second time on the face of this selected group and you should now see two boxes highlighted (one box represents the body, the second box is the face).
I think it is less confusing to do the ‘photo face transplant’ when the face is clearly on the top of the stack.

In some ASbyS, e.g., Get Up and Dance the photo face already lies on top of the group; in others the photo face lies beneath , e.g., 10 Brave Firefighters. If the latter is the case you must move the photo face to the top of the stack. To do this you must right click on the top image and select Arrange then select the command move backwards. This alters the arrangement so the photo face is now on top.

Now that the photo face is on the top of the stack, right click on the face (control click on mac) and select the command, Change Picture. Navigate to the photo you wish to bring in as an alternative; click on the Insert button.
Presto! The new face appears in the group (note: because you are working with a grouped item you should always see two selection boxes.

While still selected you can optimize the size and placement of the face. You can even rotate or flip the image horizontally to allow the image to be better integrated with the body. In 10 Brave Firefighters, the photo face must then be sent to the back to create the impression that the child is wearing the firefighter hat. Right click on photo face and select send backward.

Congratulations! You have successfully replaced the illustrated face with a photo face of your student ….. without disrupting the animation sequence! … Hours saved!!!!!!

Now that I have figured out a process for making personalizing easier, I’m sure I will be designing content differently re: how I group faces to bodies to make the process even more effortless for those of you who wish to personalize content.

Summary: I have agonized over how to make the process of personalizing ASbyS easier for quite some time. Finding a relatively simple solution to a long standing quest is a beautiful thing!

… ’til the next post … (new posts every Monday)
Next week's post will provide information on how to create photo faces with transparent backgrounds.

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