Picasa Slide Show

Picasa is another fantastic tool for storing, editing and creating with photos. I love that it pulls photos into one area to place in albums for later use. This is a fantastic organizational tool. I was disappointed that there wasn't atomic learning tutorials on blackboard for Picasa. Unfortunately I was not able to be at the Wednesday work session and when I finally got around to loading my pictures and creating a slide show on Picasa, I had some difficulty. Apparently I didn't take very good notes in class. I thought I was creating my slide show with the pictures I had uploaded to Picasa on the web, but the captions I added were not saved because I did not realize you had to save each one individually. Learning for me is always an adventure and I often seem to take the long road. When my slide show was completed, I viewed it and it looked good, but I couldn't find the embed button on the Picasa web page. I thought that was how Skip embedded his slide show, but maybe I have to use the embed button on my blog. I will try that as soon as I finish typing. As you can tell I have had technical difficulties or difficulty remembering how to embed the slide show. Well I tried a number of different ways to embed and finally realized I had to click on "link" on the Picasa web albums site and that showed the embed button which allowed me to embed it in my blog. Enjoy a taste of Thailand!

All in all I think it is a great application and I look forward to playing around with it more in the future. As with all the software we have been introduced to I think this will be a great tool in the classroom. Last week I talked about creating posters of the classroom activities throughout the year in comic life. In Picasa you could store all the pictures taken throughout the year and organize them into albums. The students could be responsible for placing captions on the pictures as they are downloaded and stored. At the end of the year a slide show could be organized and presented to the class and the parents to recap the school year. This application could also be used for reports as a visual arts presentation. School trips or field trips could be captured and made into an album and slide show as well. The students could have their individual pictures taken and stored for that particular school year. I imagine many other uses for Picasa in the classroom. I just need a tutorial to go along with it for my comfort level in using it and teaching others to use it.

Comic Life Poster

I love comic life.  It was so easy to learn how to use.  I actually completed the poster at home without having to ask my husband for assistance.  This is a great accomplishment for me!  I was very confident using this program.  In my future classroom I feel like I could lead the students on how to use this for projects.  My whole family enjoyed playing around with comic life.  I now want to make more posters of vacations and my kids have all kinds of ideas of posters to make.

There are an abundant amount of applications that comic life could be used for in a classroom.  I still love the idea of using a digital camera and capturing events and activities of the class by the day, week, quarter and year.  The students could be involved in using comic life to create posters of each week of the school year and post them as a banner around the classroom and in the hallway.  Parents, other students and teachers could view them and see what the class has been up to for that week.  This gives the students in the class a great involvement and a visual reminder of what they have done throughout the school year.  I loved the applications on Atomic Learning, especially the matching game where pictures had English and Spanish words on them and the students played a game to match up the words.  They are having fun playing a game and learning a foreign language at the same time.  My son's English teacher uses PowerPoint presentations as a tool to tie into projects, especially for those students who struggle with writing.  I am going to ask him if he knows about comic life, because I think this would be a great tool for him to incorporate for the students to use in upcoming projects.  I love comic life and intend to purchase and use it in the future at home and in my future classroom.

Digital Video

Taking digital photos is one of my passions in life. I was excited to learn I could turn them into a digital video right on my laptop with imovie. I was even more excited to learn I could have the video turned into a dvd as a gift for family members and/or friends. The learning process for imovie has been fairly simple. Atomic learning tutorials are especially helpful and I intend to utilize these tutorials in the future. I have decided that I overanalyze steps and this causes me to invest so much time doing a project.

Imovie is a fantastic tool for the classroom. I intend to utilize it in any way I can as a future teacher. Once I practice working with it and feel more confident I can see myself teaching others to use it. This is a great tool for creating class memories throughout the year, documenting field trips or special events. Students could create their own projects and present in class. The possibilities are endless. This is a great way to implement differentiated instruction.

I look forward to creating more movies and learning how to implement video footage along side still photos. Enjoy watching our family trip to China below.