Discover Digital Photography

You'll explore a broad overview of the basics of digital photography, including equipment, software, and practical uses. We'll discuss different types of digital cameras, from phones and tablets to digital SLRs, all of which offer a wide array of photographic options. We'll also help you decide what type of equipment fits your needs and provide you with hands-on exercises that let you explore the areas that interest you.

A discussion of digital photography wouldn't be complete without digital editing options. We'll explore a number of software packages, and you'll learn how to compose your shots when you know you have digital editing available to you. You'll also find out about your digital storage options—on the camera, the computer, and even beyond into cloud storage and online backups.

Mastering Your Digital SLR Camera

Get control of your digital SLR camera! In this course, you'll break through the technology barrier and learn how to use your DSLR to take beautiful photos.

You'll start out by learning about the many features and controls of your DSLR and look at the lenses you need for the kind of photography you enjoy. Next, we'll explore exposure controls. You'll learn about metering, exposure compensation, managing aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. You'll find out how to use these features to get the right exposure for every shot.

We'll then turn our attention to flash photography, managing camera controls, photo files, and even working in manual mode. With these skills, you'll be able to take your photography to the next level. Finally, the course explores high dynamic range photos and how to master those difficult and tricky exposure situations.

Photographing People with Your Digital Camera

Photographing people can be fun, exciting – and complicated! This course will make taking beautiful pictures of adults, children, and babies simple. Don't be nervous if you're new to digital photography, because we'll start with the basic principles you need to know in order to become a people photographer. You'll discover the best way to shoot faces, fix common close-up problems, and use digital photo editing techniques to retouch your photos and make other improvements. Next, we'll move onto portrait and formal group shots, where you'll learn how to organize people, which angles to use, and which to avoid. You'll become proficient in action photography, and you'll also learn several fun and creative ways to photograph children and babies. You'll even gain expertise in filling your photographs with imagery, setting moods, and creating themes. This course will have you well on your way to becoming a skilled people photographer.

Suite bundles are not eligible for partial drops or refunds. Transfers to other open sessions of the same course are available. Please refer to your school for additional details regarding drops, transfers, and refunds on Suite bundles.

For more information or to register please click the link.

Adobe Photoshop CC (also known as Photoshop Creative Cloud) is a powerful subscription software solution providing support and specialized editing tools for digital photographers and graphic artists. In this course you will master techniques to edit and enhance your digital images and add a professional polish to your work. The course offers simple, step-by-step instructions for basics like cropping, rotation, and sizing images. You will experiment with Photoshop's tools for correcting exposure, adjusting color and colorcasts, and work with Adobe's powerful layer and selection tools. You will learn how to add text, retouch, and even clone away unwanted elements from your images. You will discover how to work with raw images and prepare images for print or online use.

In this course, you will be guided through detailed explanations and instructions for using the tools that make this software so popular and unique in the world of digital editing. Whether you are a novice or accomplished photo editor, this course will give you a collection of useful techniques that will quickly show you amazing results in your images.

For more information or to register please click the link.

Bring out the best in your photos! In this course, you'll learn how to use Adobe Photoshop Elements to do everything from quick fixes to detailed enhancements that will greatly improve the look of your digital images. Even if you don't have any image-editing experience, this class will turn you into an advanced photo editor.

As you explore the program's many tools and features, you'll gain control of Photoshop Elements and create results that you never imagined possible. You'll master techniques for editing images, fixing flaws, enhancing the final product, creating simple art projects, preparing images for online use, and organizing your images.

For more information or to register please click the link.

If you've taken the first Photoshop Elements for the Digital Photographer course, or if you have a basic working knowledge of Photoshop Elements, this course will help you take your skills to the next level. You'll gain ability and confidence as you master the advanced features of this software, specifically designed for photo enthusiasts. Packed with hands-on activities and step-by-step instructions, this course will make you an accomplished editor.

Photoshop Elements gives you room to grow while allowing you to create exciting effects right from the beginning. Because it offers you more features and tools than you'll find in simpler programs, it broadens the options available to you as an amateur photographer. With the techniques you'll learn here, you'll be able to edit and enhance your photos with ease, and you'll have the power to transform any shot from "okay" to "wow!".

For more information or to register please click the links.

Ready, Set, Read!

Take this opportunity to find out how children really learn to read and write. Explore current research that cuts through the media messages about reading wars and the right way to teach children. Learn by reading stories about children, doing interactive assignments, and exploring the latest in parent and childcare information. You will see everyday children's play with a new eye as you understand how play can connect to literacy.

You'll learn how a child becomes literate from the moment of birth. First, you'll investigate the many things a child's growing mind must do to make sense of the written word and create writing. From there, you'll explore the development of reading and writing from infancy to the early school years. You'll know what problems to look for and how to assist a struggling reader. You will see how you can boost literacy growth during daily routines and child's play.

Gain confidence in your ability to guide a child's literacy development, and take pleasure in seeing how even the littlest events can lead to major steps in reading and writing success.

Guided Reading and Writing: Strategies for Maximum Student Achievement

Around 30% of students in sixth grade already have trouble with basic reading and writing. These literacy problems affect performance across subject areas, and they often leave teachers wondering how to help. Get the professional development training you need to improve student literacy as an accomplished teacher shares the secrets of turning guided reading strategies into opportunities for teaching writing. The road to literacy is also the road to ingenuity, invention, and imagination, and you'll soon learn how to take your students from groans to grins with creative lesson plans that really work!

We'll start our journey by talking about the reasons reading and writing are so difficult for students. Then we'll meet the total literacy framework and see how it mitigates literacy problems once and for all. Since this framework is based on guided reading lessons that flow naturally into writing challenges, you'll learn the recipe for a successful guided reading into writing lesson.

Once the framework is in place, we'll investigate a number of ways to modify this basic recipe for a variety of K-12 circumstances, wrapping up with a look at good writing habits and the traits of a productive writing conference. If you're looking for the right way to get students excited about the power of literacy, this is the course for you!

Note: To receive 25 hours of instruction in the State of Oregon, please ensure your school is eligible to issue professional development units, and that the course is approved by your professional learning coordinator.

Guided Reading: Strategies for the Differentiated Classroom

Now more than ever, today's teachers are grappling with the question of how to reach struggling readers. While there are no quick fixes, thousands of teachers are combining the principles of differentiated instruction and guided reading with unparalleled success. Mixed in the right proportion, these popular strategies will help you build a balanced literary framework that gets results with even the most challenged learners.

Differentiated instruction tactics will help you understand how your students learn so that you can teach in a way that makes sense to them. When you apply those tactics within the guided reading framework, which helps you lead students through new ways of approaching text, great things start to happen. The result is a classroom full of students who are able to negotiate increasingly challenging texts with unprecedented fluency.

This course is critical for today's educators, who often have to teach on the run with limited resources and unlimited demands on their time. Get ready to reach your readers with ease in no time flat!

Response to Intervention: Reading Strategies That Work

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could be proactive in helping our struggling readers? Well, we can! In this six-week course, you'll learn response to intervention (RTI) strategies that ensure the struggling readers in your classroom get the help and education they need. RTI is research based and gives us a strategic plan to bring tiered interventions to our students, at their reading level and with their unique challenges in mind. Helping them with phonics, fluency, vocabulary mastery, comprehension, and writing, these intervention strategies tackle the toughest literacy problems with flexibility and creativity.

During our time together, you'll discover tools like Elkonin Boxes, alphabetic arcs, Bloom's Taxonomy, and new and exciting graphic organizers. Whether you're working with struggling readers in kindergarten or 12th grade, you'll find that these strategies work with a full 80% of students, without the need for special pull-outs or extra IEP intervention. Why? Because RTI gets to the root of the problem—quickly!

If you're eager to learn the right ways to help your struggling readers make steady progress throughout the year, you'll find that this course gives you the power to teach flexibly and creatively, without the need for extra training in literacy or fluency. As an added bonus, there's nothing quite like helping students discover the pleasures of reading!

Suite bundles are not eligible for partial drops or refunds. Transfers to other open sessions of the same course are available. Please refer to your school for additional details regarding drops, transfers, and refunds on Suite bundles.

For more information or to register please click the link.

Create an effective resume or improve the one you already have. Transform your resume into a powerful tool that will get you interviews. Learn different resume formats and the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Make the most of your work experience and discover how to use references to your advantage. This course includes the use of online resumes and is invaluable for anyone who wants to create their own resume, or learn how to write resumes and cover letters for profit.

For more information or to register please click the link.

Romance is the #1 selling genre in mass-market fiction with readers clamoring for more! To pen a novel romance readers' love, you'll need to understand how to meet and exceed their expectations. Whether you're a new or experienced writer, this course will help you broaden your skills and understand exactly what makes a romance reader finish a book with that "Ahh" of satisfaction. You will start by learning about the genre of romance and exploring why you fell in love with your favorite romance novels. You will explore how to craft three-dimensional characters your readers will love and how to weave a plot so your story grabs the reader's interest from page one. You will gain valuable techniques—your "romance writer's toolbox"—to apply to your own manuscript.

You will also spend a couple lessons looking at and practicing elements important for any writer to master: setting, pacing, point of view, dialogue, research, mood, and tone. You will take on fun assignments that will help you hone your craft. By the time you finish, you'll be able to pick up a book and figure out what makes it a best seller, or why it's been called a classic, or why it appealed to you as a reader. Even better, you'll have mastered tools and techniques so you can add those same elements to your own writing.

For more information or to register please click the link.

SAT/ACT Prep – Part 1

Both the ACT and the SAT contain verbal and math question types. SAT/ACT Preparation Part I will give you all the information you need to do well on the verbal questions of the ACT and the new SAT. The ACT verbal sections are called the Reading Test, the English Test, and the Science Test. The Reading Test and the English Test assess your knowledge of English usage, grammar, and reading comprehension. This course will provide you with a grammar and usage review specifically geared to the rules that you'll be tested on in the ACT. You'll also learn how to maximize your time on reading comprehension passages and the passages in the science test.

Beginning March 2016, the SAT verbal questions changed. The lessons in this course will prepare you for those changes. You'll learn how to answer the questions types in the most time-efficient manner.

SAT/ACT Prep – Part 2

Both the ACT and the SAT contain verbal and math question types. SAT/ACT Preparation Part 2 will give you all the information you need to do well on the math questions of the ACT and the new SAT. The ACT math tests your knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and basic statistics. This course provides you with a complete math review of all these subjects. We'll also show you how to use your time wisely so that you finish as many math questions as possible in the 60 minutes the ACT gives you for the math test.

Beginning with the March 2016 exam, the SAT math questions have changed a bit. The lessons in this course are designed to prepare you for those changes.

Series bundles are not eligible for partial drops or refunds. Transfers to other open sessions of the same course are available. Please refer to your school for additional details regarding drops, transfers, and refunds on Series bundles.

Instructor led course only. Dates available are April 12, May 17, Jun 14 and July 12.

For more information or to register please click the link.