The end of the semester is quickly approaching, so here I am looking back at all of the things we've done in our Education Technology class. I think on of the most fun sections in the class was on Photo Sharing and photo editing. If I would have reflected during the that chapter, I might have said that I thought photo sharing was something I would never use as a teacher. I'm still a little unconvinced as to how often I may use this in my classroom, BUT I definitely feel prepared should I ever need to.
In our class we worked with Animoto, Smilebox and the Picnik/Picasa combo through Google. By favorite was Picnik/Picasa. As we continued with our projects throughout the semester, I found this tool to be very helpful! Picnik allows you to edit pictures (crop, rotate, add captions, etc.) very easily and with Picasa through google, you can easily save and organize your pictures on the web. This was particularly helpful when working on projects because I could easily upload pictures, edit them, and save them online, making them easy to access from anywhere I may need.
As for Animoto and Smilebox, I don't know that I will use these as much in the future. Smilebox is a really neat tool, however, the tool (to be used to its full potential) must be downloaded onto a computer, which is something I'm not particularly interested in. Smilebox does have a lot of different options for editing though, so if I ever needed to be super fancy. And concerning Animoto, I don't know how often I will use this in my career, but I was extremely excited to hear about this video making tool. Based on my experience with the digital story project (Windows Movie Maker), I would like to try working with Animoto in the future. Although I know there aren't nearly as many options, Animoto sereiously decreases the number of the decision the user has to make, which I'm sure I will be very interested in as my teacher career begins.
Overall, I really enjoyed the photo sharing section of this class much more than expected and I am now seeing more and more application for these tools in my own classroom!
No comments:
Post a Comment