Every year, we have a Valentine-related workshop. At this one, we will use online photo-editing website Picnik to transform photos into Valentine ‘cards’. You will have your own copies, and we will make an online slideshow of the best results. It is essential to have an email address that you know how to use – but you don’t need much more experience than that.
In a nutshell.
Choose photos from our Valentine collection, upload them to the Picnik website, turn them into Valentine cards which you can save.
Please reserve your workshop place.
Reserve your place by sending an email to acc@lawns.org.uk – and please read your email again soon after for our reply, as our workshops get over-subscribed very quickly. People who have reserved get priority, but must be there when the workshop begins at 3:30 pm.
Agewell in Hackney eligibility.
Our funders expect that everyone attending the workshops they pay for should be eligible for other Agewell in Hackney services – that they should be Hackney residents aged 50 to 65. However, sometimes we invite other people to join us.
We have acceded to requests for another Picnik workshop. Picnik is one of the most popular web sites at Agewell Computer Club – a free web site where you can …
Upload photographs and other digital pictures.
Do interesting things with them, for example – special effects, colour filters, add text, resize, crop, rotate.
Download the resulting images back to your own computer – or email them to yourself, or to somebody else.
At the workshop, we will …
Show you how to upload photographs (from our collection, or perhaps one of yours) to Picnik.
Suggest special effects and text options to help you convert your photos into something that has a passing resemblance to a greetings card (Christmas, New Year, birthday, whatever).
Show you how to save your greetings cards back to your computer.
Show you how to email your greetings cards to a friend (or to yourself).
If you have a Posterous blog account, show you how to send your cards to your blog website.
Make an online slide show of the best cards you make.
Hackney Museum is working with Mosaic Films to create a user-generated short documentary from material uploaded to YouTube by members of the Hackney community.
The film will explore the unique nature of life in Hackney today and the momentous change the borough is experiencing in the lead up to the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
We want you, the Hackney community, to help us create an authentic portrait of life in Hackney by telling us what you want the film to explore. What is important to you, the unseen or under-celebrated parts of life in Hackney today?
Your answers to these questions will shape the brief that we will release in January 2012, inviting video submissions from across the borough.
Open session.
When: Saturday, 3 December 2011 (11 am to 12 pm).
Where: Hackney Museum, Learning and Technology Centre, 1 Reading Lane E8 1GQ .
‘Left to Our Own Devices’ sets out to challenge our preconceptions about how older people interact with technology now and in the future.
The contest is run jointly by Age UK, a national charity, and KT EQUAL, a research consortium dedicated to improving the lives of older and disabled people.
Entries will be judged not only on their photographic merit but also on how they address issues related to the central theme of older people’s interactions with technology — perhaps by challenging stereotypes, defying expectations or delivering a powerful message.
The most successful images will be selected from across four categories:
Gadgets and Gizmos.
In the Home.
Out and About.
An open category.
All the selected images will be included in a touring exhibition that will visit the Parliament at Westminster and the Assemblies at Cardiff and Stormont, and finishing at the Scottish Parliament next spring.
One image in each category will also receive a cash prize of £250.
Workshop: Tuesday 15 November 2011 (3.30 to 5 pm).
In a nutshell.
How to make your own website with photos and anything else you want to put there – and do it all just by sending emails.
About blogs.
A ‘blog’ is name for a certain kind of website. Most blogs have content that is regularly updated. For example, this Agewell Computer Club website is a blog – though most blogs have personal content, owned by people who use them to express their own thoughts, opinions, experiences – and very often now, to put photographs on the World Wide Web – we call that photo blogging.
About Posterous.
Posterous is a free blogging resource. Here are some other things we like about it …
It’s easy.
It’s easy to register, set up and maintain as a personal site. We think it is suitable for beginners. It makes photo blogging very easy.
Posting by email.
We can add content simply by sending an email to a special email address. The email creates a new post so that:
the email subject becomes the post title,
the email message becomes the content of the post,
and images attached to the email are inserted in the post.
Anyone who has an email account anywhere can make a Posterous blog without learning anything new.
Themes.
It’s easy to change what our site looks like. For example, the slideshow on the right shows our demo photo blog in 11 different themes. The content hasn’t changed at all, but the way it is presented can be changed at any time.
Privacy controls.
If we want to, we can make our Posterous site private for friends or family only.
Autoposting to other sites.
We can connect Posterous to our account at Facebook (and many other social media sites) so that anything we post to Posterous appears on our Facebook page.
More about our demo photo blog.
The demo blog is called Holiday in Hackney. It didn’t take very long to make it. We did all of it just by sending email attachments to the Posterous site.
We will get you started with your own Posterous blog. Afterwards, of course, you can do what you like with it. It doesn’t have to be a photo blog, because there is so much else you could do with it. As always, if you need photos we will provide you with some that you can practice with – so you don’t have to bring your own. Much of the workshop will be help sending attachments.
Irfanview is the default image editor at Agewell Computer Club, so it’s about time we had a workshop about how to use it.
Irfanview is a free image viewer and editor for Windows computers. It has been around for many years, and seems to have established a small niche for itself. While it is not as good as the expensive programs used by professionals, it is definitely more than adequate for the basic photo editing needs of people who come to Agewell Computer Club. And it’s free!
We have installed it on all our computers, and there is also a portable version that you can install on a flash drive.
At the workshop.
We will get you started on this very useful program, doing the most important photo editing functions first – resizing to make a photo a good size for an email attachment, cropping to change the composition, simple colour adjustments.
As always, we will provide you with some photos that you can practice on – so you don’t have to bring your own.
Click on the triangular ‘play’ button to start the video.
A short documentary about Ridley Road market in Dalston, filmed on Saturday 4 December 2010. The film is shot in time lapse and features interviews and stories from some of the market traders.
Workshop: Tuesday 20 September 2011 (3.30 to 5 pm).
Fotografix is a free photo editor that you can use for all common image editing functions (for example – cropping, resizing, adjusting brightness and contrast), and quite a lot more besides. It’s very easy and the results are excellent. In our opinion, it is an excellent program for digital photography beginners, as well as more experienced learners. So we have installed it on all the computers at The Lawns. There is also a ‘portable’ version that will work on a USB flash drive.
We will get you started on this new addition to our graphics software repertoire. As always, we will provide you with some photos that you can practice on – so you don’t have to bring your own.
Example slideshow.
Here are some examples of what you can do with Fotografix. Most people just want to crop and resize their photographs, but there is much else that you can do – and it’s very easy in Fotografix.
Dave Ramdial, director of ‘Hold It Down’ will be at The Lawns on Tuesday 12 July 2011 (12 to 1 pm) to meet Caribbean elders (ie: 50 or over). So, if you are a Caribbean elder – please come and hear what Dave has to say about this inter-generational project. It’s not just socially important – it’s also a great opportunity for you to learn some new digital skills.
If you would like to contact Dave personally, his phone number is 020 8525 0600, and his email address is dave@holditdown.org.uk .
Here is Dave’s original message …
A Comic Relief funded inter-generational video/film project involving 12 Caribbean elders and 12 young black men who have been involved in gang crime. The focus is on the Caribbean war-time community as a way of telling their stories from the 2nd world war to the present day from a Hackney perspective.
The project would involve older people being paired with young people in order to support them to plan, design and produce the film/video. Working in partnership with Hackney Caribbean elders. Young people and elders will be taught video and film skills by a local Hackney production company to produce a series of short films/video which capture the voices of the elders through young people. The project will also work in partnership with the Youth Offending Team. The project would span 12 months – produce the scripts, film including edit. This will be presented at film/video screenings at local lunch clubs, elders day centres with a grand screening night open to all elders at the Hackney Empire.
The aims are to teach film based skills, inter personal skills, team working and intergenerational skills for both young people and elders. Once completed a resource pack will be created and sent out to all Hackney schools.
All sessions will be held in Hackney and we will arrange travel if necessary.
This will be a repeat of the workshop we started on 10 May, but never finished.
YouTube is a ‘video sharing’ website — a place where anyone can place short videos that they have made themselves, to be watched by anyone else. Since it started in 2005, it has been one of the most popular sites at the Lawns centre – for music, entertainment, sport, education, inspiration, amusement and random frivolity.
At the workshop we will look at everything you can do with YouTube – including how to search it, create an account, and (obviously) upload your own videos.
YouTube is one of the most popular sites at the Lawns centre – for music, entertainment, sport, education, inspiration, amusement and random frivolity – but we have never had a YouTube workshop. So, by popular request, we are going to put that right. We will look at everything you can do with YouTube – including how to search it, create an account, and (obviously) upload your own videos.
Don’t know how to make a video, or get a video off your smartphone or camera? That’s a future workshop.
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Left to Our Own Devices.
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Short courses at The Lawns, 
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Dave Ramdial, director of ‘Hold It Down’ will be at The Lawns on 
