How to use Picasa to create your class / school yearbook

Creating a school yearbook is a hindrance for teachers who are time poor and struggle to layout images and text in an aesthetic and meaningful manner.

Picasa - that brilliant free photo editing tool from Google has a couple of great features that will make your class page look like it was done by a professional by using the collage tool.

This video below shows all the options and capabilities of Picasa's collage tool  After that. the only real decision you need to make is whether or not to yearbook yourself.

Teach with Movies

With the Oscars done and dusted for 2012 it would be fair to say that this year has been a bit of a disappointment for the film industry which could well be a reflection of the current economic climate.

Luckily there have been hundreds of amazing films made that are just as good a text for your students as any of the great written texts of all time. if you don't use film in the classroom to engage your students then you are missing out on a major cultural hook.

Teach with Movies is a paid site but at $11.99 per year for a school I am happy to give this the edgalaxy tick of value as it houses over 350 learning guides for some of the best films ever made. 

These guides cover a range of learning areas but all have excellent content for literature. 

Take a look at teach with movies and take a deeper look at some of their great films that will both inspire and educate your students to learn again.

Pics 4 Learning - Nice Alternative to Google Images

Pics4Learning is a safe, free image library for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos and images for classrooms, multimedia projects, web sites, videos, portfolios, or any other project in an educational setting.

The thousands of photos in this collection are approved for use in the classroom and indexed and sorted in order to maximize their effective use by students in a 21st century classroom.

Access pics4learning here.

The Top 5 Online Photo Editing Tools for Students

Here are some great photo / image editing options that will works traight out of the browser. Students will find some cool effects and tricks within these I am sure. Be sure to take a look at webification if you would like to know some more great online photo editing tools.

Picnik

Picnik allows you to edit things in a variety of ways. You can crop, rotate, resize, edit exposure, edit colors, sharpen, fix red eye, and auto fix. The auto-fix tool is cool, because it will take inconsistencies in the photo, and spruce them up a little big. But all of the other tools are pretty much self explanatory. Picnik has many tools found in full-fledged image editing programs such as adjusting exposure, contrast and shadows and highlights. Picnik offers all the basic tools to crop, resize, rotate, sharpen and fix red-eye. It also has plenty of special effects and filters and other advanced controls to fine-tune photos.Whatever tool or feature you use, instructions are provided in pop-up windows at the time you access them.

Aviary

Aviary’s mission statement is to “Make the world’s creation accessible.” Although their mission is a little vague, their free image editing application is surprisingly robust for tools you can access completely for free. Aviary is a free, online digital editing software application to manipulate photos and images, or create your own. This tool is best suited for people who already have some knowledge of digital image manipulation. If you are a novice or cannot afford to purchase high-end software – the tools are great and worth mastering but expect a fairly intense learning curve.

Pixlr

Pixlr stands out for the depth and breadth of its image design and editing tools and features, combining many of the tried and true tools available in most Paint programs with high-quality features that have become ubiquitous in image editing programs, software-based or not. Pixlr also includes basic layer canvas tools and features, letting users free-hand crop, move, super-impose and interpolate images and rotate and remove entire canvases, all important tools for true image editing.

Photoshop.com

Photoshop.com is the latest offering for web-based photo sharing and editing. As long standing major players in the imaging software industry for graphics and video professionals, Adobe (US) have now launched an easy to use and free online version of their popular photo editing package, Photoshop. While not attempting to provide all the features of the desktop version of Photoshop, it certainly has a good selection of quality image editing tools for the more common tasks. Including a generous 2 Gigabytes (2000 Megabytes) of space for storing your photos in the free version, you can perform a range of edits including cropping, resizing, adjusting colors and removing that annoying red-eye effect.

FlauntR

flauntR is a privately funded, online photo and effect editor. Their goal is simple, provide an easy to use interface to manage, modify and enhance images without any outside software. They do this with and Adobe Flash driven interface that allows a user to use editR, stylR, textR, mobilR, picasR, and profilR — all flauntR specific enhancements. While the interface of flauntR can be a bit confusing at first (with six different categories of modifications), after a quick 5 minute lesson, most users are good to go. Through a series of questions and answers, the application can transform the images that are put into it into works of art (or whatever the uploader’s heart desires).

Windows Live Movie Maker in the Classroom

Windows Live Movie Maker in the classroom

Windows Live Movie maker is a fast, easy way to turn your photos and video clips into great-looking movies and slide shows for teaching.

The sights, sounds and action of a movie helps bring a subject to life. Create polished movies in about a minute using the AutoMovie feature. Windows Live Movie Maker has prompts to help you upload and share your movie on YouTube, or to burn a DVD for your class.

You will need a PC with either Windows 7 or Windows Vista. Click here to access teaching resources on Windows Live Movie Maker

let your students get creative with photos at PhotoFunia

PhotoFunia is an online photo editing tool that gives your students a fun filled experience.  You upload any photo and just wait to see the magic. Photfunia automatically identifies the face in the photo and let's you add cool photo effects and create funny face photo montages.

PhotoFunia is free and very easy to use. Just select an effect you like from over 100 different effects, upload your photo, and PhotoFunia will handle the rest for you.

Ypour students will love the chance to get artistic and create their own magazine covers and billboards of themselves and have a great time.

Access PhotoFunia here.

 

How to Make an iMovie Introduction for Keynote

The following video provides a tutorial on how to make an imovie introduction for Keynote.  You can view it below or download it here.

Tilt-shift Maker will turn all of your photos into miniatures - An amazing effect

Tilt-shift miniature style photos are pictures of real-life scenes that are manipulated to look like model photographs.

Now you can easily transform your existing digital camera photos into tilt-shift style miniatures using tiltshiftmaker.com. Our online photo editing tool is fun and requires no registration or signup. 

It is a really cool effect that will give your photos a distinct look and your students will love it.  Try out Tilt Shift Makerhere.