Picasa is a free download to organize, edit, play with and share photos. It's user friendly and so much fun! Photography is one of my hobbies so this was like taking a kid to the playground to frolic through the many features of Picasa. I've spent many hours playing with pictures of my beautiful granddaughter, Avyana. Here's a photo to share her beauty with the world.
I hadn't previously understood how easy it was to share photos with others through Picasa and Google. Now, I can share with my daughter, my extended family and my friends when I want to share pics of Avy! Also, I'm excited about the potential to incorporate the features and share knowledge of this awesome program with my students. We use photography in several projects and this will take the confusion out of submitting photos for A Day in the Life of an AMS 8th Grader, Photo Essay of the Genres of Literature, and The Playlist of My Life. There were times in the past that turning the actual photos digitally was the most difficult aspect of the project. Here's my photo folder to check out pictures of another hobby of mine-gardening. To learn about Picasa-check this out!
And for some instructions on how to share your photos-click here.
YouTube also has a lot of cool features I wasn't aware of until I looked into it this week. WOW! Entertaining, educational, and easy to use-You Tube could easily be a teacher's best friend. There are two features I learned about to make You Tube a little less of a monster to maneuver through and less distracting than the old search and find method of my past.
The first feature I'd like to discuss is Quiet Tube. This actually creates a page that will play only the video without all the comments at the bottom of the page. I use You Tube to introduce some controversial topics to get kids thinking-those distracting comments can ruin that plan very quickly!
(If only we could get rid of the advertisements as well!) I was thrilled to learn about Quiet Tube! Here's a really quick video to explain the benefits and how to use it:
Also making the cut for this week's blog is the Tubesnack website that allows you to work within YouTube. Tubesnack allows you to collect and organize your videos for class. I created a playlist to organize all the grammar and punctuation rules from 8th grade language arts standards. In the future, I will probably keep the play list to 5-6 videos but I have a monster of a playlist to pull out and show any time I need some reinforcement on a certain rule. Love knowing how to create them-it was so simple to create. I know it will be a feature I use a lot in the future. Check out my playlist here.
I'm becoming so techy-my students might think I'm one of them! Honestly, I wouldn't want that but I do truly love learning all of the cool features Google has to offer!
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