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.
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I love the idea of combining the capabilities of Comic Life and Picasa as you have described. Picasa would male a great place to store pictures and Comic Life would be a great way to review them later and display them.
ReplyDeleteThis is the kind of generalization that you always look for in your students--the ability to think beyond a single tool and combine two or more to suit your needs.