Have you ever used a picture
editing software? Did you pay for it? Well good news, Google provides a picture
editing tool for free called Picasa! All you need to do to access this great
tool is to create a Google account; you even need to create a Gmail if you do
not wish to. Picasa essentially allows you to create, organize, edit, and share
your photos from your computer. This tool will access photos from your
computer, upload it into their system for you and place them in folders. Once
your pictures are placed into folders, the possibilities are endless for
creating and sharing. You can also import your photos from a camera, scanners,
or a storage media you may use on the web. You can edit your photos several
ways in this software. It allows you to manage and edit your photos with great
ease. You can create new folders within the software, or you can keep the
folder names the same as you have them saved to your computer. Picasa has the
standard editing tools such as adjusting color, adding effects, and adding text
to pictures. There are actually 9 standard editing tools. Another interesting
editing tool that Picasa has is that you can make collages and movies. I really
enjoy editing pictures so these two editing tools are naturally the first two I
decided to play with. Creating the collage reminded me of scrapbooking except
online so I found that to be very neat. I also created a movie, and I can personally
say, after using IMovie from a Mac, I found this software much easier to use
and understand. Another interesting command that I found while playing around
in Picasa is called “Geotag a photo in Google Earth”. This is a tool that will
allow you to embed a location of information into a file of a chosen photo. You
can then even sync that photo to Google Earth, where it can then be displayed
on the Google Earth satellite map. How cool is that?
Some affordances of this tool
within a classroom setting could be that it allows for creativity to emerge. This tool could really allow students to think
outside of the box. Inside of having students present through writing a paper
or making a poster board, you as a teacher, could have students make a movie on
the topic they are presenting on. This would allow for great growth within the
classroom because then students would be challenged to think past writing
simple facts down. They would now have to develop pictures, words, artifacts,
and audio into a movie all through Picasa. A constraint to this tool is the
fact that teachers would have to learn to develop a project around this tool in
order to use it successfully. This is a piece of technology that is very
interesting to use but yet every time consuming. Most teachers will just tell
the students what they expect of them for a project and then never touch on it
again until it due. But I believe teachers could not do that with this
technology because learning how to use it properly takes at least a couple of
days to become comfortable with all of its commands. Another constraint of
using this tool inside a classroom is that you would need access to several
computers. Not many school districts can afford computers for every child; some
cannot even afford computers at all. So if the teacher would choose to use this
tool in their classroom, they would have to be very creative about how to use
the couple of the computers for a large classroom size of students.
The students and the teacher would
have to develop certain technology skills in order to use this tool. The
students would have to learn how to upload, import, and add photos from the
computer into the software and then from there they would have to learn what
command is what inside the software in order to use to properly. The teacher
would also have to learn skills and become a master at using this software
before implementing it into a classroom that way they are then able to answer
questions and help students while they are using it. I also think it would be
in the best interest of the teacher to learn how to block the internet while
using the computer for this tool that way students are unable to go off task
and surf the web inside of using Picasa. I also believe that a teacher who uses
this is in their classroom is going to have to change their style of teaching.
Most teachers feel the need to control every part of a classroom or part of a
project and when using Picasa, it is virtually impossible to do so. Picasa is
all about embracing creativity, and creativity cannot be control. Therefore the
teacher would have to able to let go of the controlling factor of the classroom
while using Picasa and allow for natural flow of discussions and teachable
moments when using it inside a classroom. The teacher would also have to gain a
lot of patience when using Picasa in a classroom because students are going to
be asking a lot of questions and the teacher is going to need to answer them
without becoming frustrated. Because I believe that when I student sees that
their teacher is frustrated that their level of thinking in then dissolved
because they become too worried about pleasing the teacher inside of learning.
There are many ways that you can
include this software in the classroom. I believe the book gives several great
examples of this. Some of the ideas they listed included creating a movie for
an Open House event, make a movie of student’s performances in assemblies’,
celebrations, or field trips, create a class photo yearbook. The book also
suggested that you could use Picasa as a way of students creating
documentaries, photojournalism, and dramatizations which I think would be
spectacular in older grade levels. For literacy, you could have the students
develop a project through Picasa demonstrating a “how to” guide, which then
would allow the students to build and reflect on sequential thinking.
Personally, I think this is a great piece of software to be able to compile a
digital portfolio of the entire student’s works to show the parents at the end
of the school year or even in parent teacher conferences.
Below I have attached two links to extend your
knowledge of how you can use Picasa in your classroom. The first link is a
great resource. It is actually a wikispace page that was made by teachers. On
this page you can find out more about Picasa as a software and then creative
and innovative ways to incorporate this into your classroom on a daily bases. The
second link that I have listed below is a link to read an article that was
written by another teacher and how he used Picasa to publish his student’s
works. I found this article interesting because it touched my idea of using it
to create a virtual portfolio of the students work over the course of the year.
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