Animated Step-by-Steps®

Monday, February 29, 2016

Home on the Bus Song to Personalize

I recently posted the Home on the Bus Animated Step-by-Step Song on the Teachers Pay Teachers site. http://bit.ly/HomeOnTheBus This is a great song for reaching closure at the end of the school day and in the younger grades it has the advantage of gradually ‘releasing’ students to gather their belongings and receive personalized assistance in getting dressed for the bus trip home. Typically there is a classroom assistant assigned the task of overseeing the ‘released students’, while the primary facilitator continues to lead the remaining students in singing the Home on the Bus song on the interactive whiteboard (or large monitor).

Although Home on the Bus is available in three formats (Regular, SymbolStix and PCS), only the regular version is available to followers as a free resource for a limited time only. The conversion process is relatively straight forward. So if you’ve been tempted to ‘try your hand’ at personalizing an ASbyS for your class … this is an easy place to start.

The Home on the Bus Song (sung to the tune of Goodnight Louise) allows the class to sing goodbye to every student in the class before they head home on the bus. No worries if you don't know that tune. There is a song button that provides the song in a child's voice.

Here's how the activity works. Click on the photo of a child, e.g. Randy, on the launch page. You will hear a click and the PowerPoint will link directly to a 'Randy page'. When you are finished singing to Randy, he is ‘released’ to go gather his gear, while you click on the multifaceted star (upper left corner of the pink header) to navigate back to the launch page where you can ‘surprise’ the ‘next’ student with a chance to be the singing center of attention.

Here are the Steps for Personalizing the Home on the Bus Song

First, you will need to replace the illustrated child images (serving as place holders) on the ‘launch page’ with the photo faces of students in your class.

Right click (control –click on the mac) on an illustrated face … a dialog box will appear … select Change Picture … then navigate to the folder where you have saved your class photo faces … select a photo face, e.g., Randy … the face will appear as a substituted image on the launch page. DO NOT delete anything; everything programmed in relation to the original image will transfer effortlessly to the new image if you simply use the change picture command.

Now let's customize the child-specific pages/slides.

Let’s start with the colored name text on the 'Randy Page'. Select one of the three colored text boxes … type in the new name, e.g., Randy. DO NOT delete the xxxxxxx placeholders (select, highlight and ‘type over’ the xxxx’s). Repeat this process for all three text boxes. When completed, the name Randy should be visible in triplicate on the ‘Randy page’.

Now let’s bring in Randy’s photo. The procedure is identical to the process used to substitute photos on the launch page. Right click on the illustrated face image … select the command Change picture … navigate to your Student Photo Face folder … highlight the Randy file (.png), then select insert. Presto! Randy’s face appears where the illustrated face previously existed and all the actions/animations associated with the previous image have now been transferred to Randy’s photo … no need to re-program animations.

Just in case it’s still not clear … here is a small video that further illustrates the process of personalizing the Home on the Bus Song. http://bit.ly/HomeOnBusVideo

Enjoy using your personalized ASbyS.

Thank you for following the Animated Step-by-Step blog.

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

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Augmentative Communication Consultant

Speech-Language Pathologist

Special Educator

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.