Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Picasa for Students

Students want to use Google Apps for their email and file storage. Many of them are already using it outside of school, so why not move it to the classroom? It's free, has great educational tools included, tons of educational support and resources online, and a huge and growing community of users.

One of tools included with a student Google Apps account is Picasa, a great photo management application. With Picasa, students can organize all of the photos on their computer into one nicely layed-out interface and then edit, customize, and share photos with friends, family, classmates, or teachers.

Students can use Picasa to share project photos, create movies and picture stories, crop and resize, add fun effects, or just manage all of the pictures they take for themselves or a group.

With a Google Apps account, students have access to Blogger, Google+, YouTube, and more. After taking pictures, creating great looking movies and slideshows, they can be shared with all three. They can turn a project on Volcanoes into a stop motion movie to present to the class. Take an old poem and add images to make a photo story. Solve a difficult equation with some manipulatives and stop-motion photography. Spin a current using positive images for difficult subject matter.

No matter what the subject, project, or group, Picasa can make pictures tell stories and aid learning.


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