Have A Sense of Humor: Transforming My Face

Starting from the beginning of the class, I felt like the lesson using computer could be a little difficult lesson to teach especially because I am not an expert in using Photoshop program. As students started to work on the projects, they had many questions to ask. Although many were already explained by Tiffany, they had problems that just occur because of the technical issues. As I was helping out with a student, Ginger, I had an incident that makes me think and question myself about ‘what could’ve been I done at that time?’ Ginger was the girl who wanted to use painting tool to make her face into an old man. She started to use green colors to add mustache, beard, and long hair to transform the face to look more funny and different. As I came by to answer her question, she told me that the work was finished. I thought the artwork was well completed, too, so I tried to save the work. Although I saved it as the way I usually do it through ‘Save As’ icon, it was looking like it saved a work in a different format. After I closed it and opened the picture, it didn’t allow me to open. At that moment I saw Ginger’s face and I knew how disappointed she was. I did not know what to say to her because I knew how much effort and work she put in to paint on the face. I just told her, “I don’t know what happened with how I saved your work, I am sorry. Would you like to do it again since we have more time?” So she worked on it again for a while to re-work on the artwork, and same problem arose with the saving. The class was almost over that I told her again that she can stay for a little longer to work again. She ended up just putting couple dots and lines to just finish the work. I decided to just take the screen picture and save the artwork instead of trying to save it through the program so that I don’t lose her work. Until now, this incident makes me feel very regretful, and makes me strongly believe that using technology in elementary level is difficult. More than what I feel about technology, I was thinking about what I should have done when accidents like this occur. What should’ve been said to her, and what should have been done to let her work on the artwork, again? Although I ended up losing her work, I think it was an important experience that I had a chance to think about questions like this in facing a sudden and unexpected problems.