9 Objects of My Isolation

We've been out of school since March 13 and most instruction is being delivered online at this point. As a teacher, I don't like it. For Elementary, maybe it's fun. I mean, you have 25-30 kids in your class and you are "their classroom teacher" so they spend almost all day with you (and have been since August). In high school, I have 130 students a day, so mine are with me for 50 minutes and have 7 other teachers to see daily. That's 8 sets of classroom rules/expectations and 8 different personalities (some who they click with and some who they do not!).

So, as part of my "alone time" I prepared (in honor of the instagram challenge), 9 Objects of My Isolation (using PhotoPea on a Chromebook, since I am asking my Photoshop kids to do one as well).

And, here's my explanation...

1. Top Left:  Puzzle! We worked on a 1000 piece puzzle at some point after the first week. Everyone in the family worked on it together from time to time. I ordered other puzzles, but after two weeks off, no one really cared to do them anymore. :(
2. Top Middle:  Zoom! I don't know if my students are getting tons of Zoom calls, but we do a faculty zoom at least once a week, department meetings by Zoom, FBLA officer meetings (and virtual interviews) with Zoom.. and I'm finally trying it with a class next week and hoping at least a few show up.
3. Top Right: Kitties! That's Pumpkin and Ollie. I have a feeling they wish we were all at work/school because they are probably tired of having people around constantly.
4. Middle Left: Wii! We pulled out the Wii again. We've mostly played Smarty Pants and Wheel of Fortune. I wish I had a working Balance Board, but it died in a flooded basement sometime in the last few years.
5. Middle:  My Girls! Though my kids are tired of being at home, it's been nice to see them every day and spend time together that we wouldn't typically get to spend, especially my senior daughter who moved into the dorms in August for college.
6. Middle Right: Meat! Okay, I just thought it was funny that after a week out, meat was hard to find. This was a pic from a day where I was excited to find two kinds of meat at one store!
7. Bottom Left: Road Trips! I mean, when you can't visit many places, you get in the car and drive. We've done a little roaming around.
8. Bottom Middle: Netflix! My oldest daughter and I watched all seasons of Kim's Convenience, a sitcom. Now I'm watching Scandal (crazy!).
9. Bottom Right: Scrabble! We've been playing board games quite a bit. Scrabble, Pictionary, and Telestrations, to name a few!

Hope your COVID break has provided you time to relax, learn, and spend some time with your family. But, I am sure missing my students!

No Illustrator? Try YouIDraw! (free)

Here's a 15 minute review/demo of a browser-based vector graphics editor/creator. The free version is limited, but when it comes to something similar to Adobe Illustrator that can be done on a Chromebook, this is about as close as I have found.

Tools you will see:

• Typical Move, Rotate, Skew
• Shape tools
• Type tool
• Hand tool

Panels/Features you will see:

• Layers panel
• Pathfinder (similar) panel at top of the screen
• Library (gradients are here, and it actually has objects and lots of shapes)
• Properties panel (where you can change fonts, modify fill/stroke, transparency and appearance panel type things, flip horizontal/vertical, and the canvas size/background color)
• Export button-- be sure to tell it to export OBJECTS and not entire Canvas if you want transparency

They have a pretty simple user guide, too-- https://site.youidraw.com/youidraw-drawing-user-guide.html

What's really missing-- (among other things)

• No knife tool
• No trace bitmap (you can insert images, though, and if they are SVG images, you can edit the paths, change colors, etc.)
• No good control over angles
• No Shapebuilder or other fancy tools
• Text path tools
• Ability (in free version) to export in anything other than PNG (transparent) and JPG

What it does that Illustrator DOES NOT do-- save to Google Drive!