*giggle* Happy to help, Mary
Eeep! I think giving all those lessons I did this weekend would be hard to do in writing (you ladies who were there saw how animatedly I explain things ><). But regarding white balance, it has to do with making the colors in your photos true to life. Most cameras will be set to "auto", but also include options for things like "Day Light", "Cloudy", and "Tungsten"; last in those menus is usually an option called something like "Custom". If you select that, you get an additional instruction on how to "set"; to do this, point the camera at something white located where you will be standing, and press whatever button it's telling you to "set" with. Voila! You would have to re-do this each photo session.
For the photo collages, I use Photoshop (expensive) but you can do what Mary suggested, and I think that you can do something similar with PowerPoint as well. Google probably has some free software that works for this as well.