Sunday, February 5, 2012

Picasa in the Classroom


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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