Picture & Image Editing

Picasa

For a few decades now, the use of visual material in classroom has been vital to the teaching and learning process. After empirical research asserted the positive use of visuals in improving the students' learning experience, among many other educationally unrelated factors, the technology of designing and preparing visual materials has seen great enhancements. In this blog, I am going to look specifically at image editing tools and how educators as well as students can utilize them in their teaching and learning.

One of the available tools online that the book indicated is Google's photo editing tool, Picasa. However, this tool has been retired by Google and now they have Google Photos instead. Through Google Photos, users may upload and share their pictures with others. They also have the ability to store and categorize these pictures in many categories by people, places, things, media type, or even create collages.

In order to upload a media file to Google Photos, you only have to drag and drop the file and it will be uploaded. Alternatively, Google also provides a desktop application called Desktop Uploader in order to help people explore their computers and choose whatever files they want to share.

So far, Google Photos seems like a good way to store media files and share them online. How about photo editing services? Does Google Photos provide any type of online photo editing? Actually, it does. Google Photos' editor allows you to do some basic editing to your picture. Some basic adjustments like changing the picture's light, color, pop, or vignette is possible through moving a scroll tool to increase or decrease the effects.

In addition, there are some predesigned color filters that allows you to change how the picture appears.

Finally, you may crop and/or rotate the picture to crop out some parts and change its angle.

To conclude, as an educator I believe that the use of online photo editing services, such as Google Photos, allow the teacher and students to collaborate and share pictures and edit them for educational purposes. This makes learning a more fun and motivates students to come up with creative work. Shared media files is nowadays trending and educators need to keep up with how the students of this generation think and what attracts them. This way we ensure that we are engaging our students and making them benefit from their learning experience to the max.

Photofunia

Another cool and available online picture editing tool is Photofunia. This tool can be used in a variety of ways in a classroom settings. One of the ways that I can think of right now is in storytelling. For example, a creating writing teacher may ask his/her students to write up a story with the help of visual aid. Photofunia will be an amazing option due to its magical use of face detection technology that would enable the students to manipulate pictures easily without any prior knowledge in media designing. The options are a lot and students can create either a static picture or create animated "GIF" images using up to five pictures.

To clarify more of what some of the possible outcomes you may get from this website, I have attached this funny example. Indeed, Photofunia through its different filters may trigger the students' imagination and creativeness to build even better pictures. I believe that this online tool is valuable to all the students, but those without advanced photo editing skills will benefit the most.

To be accurate, Photofunia provides 479 different filters that are categorized into 21 different categories, such as Halloween, Christmas, cards, posters, etc. This tool through all these effects has successfully merged between photos and fun in a real sense of the word. The only downside to this tool is that it is pretty specific. Also, once you choose the filter, you are requested to upload a picture to use it in the desired filter. After that, there is nothing you can do to edit the picture. So basically, it is oversimplified and does not provide that much of flexibility to edit the pictures the way one might want to. However, with what it can do, it is definitely worth considering for a classroom activity or two.