Sharing the Addiction

Yes - I am continuing with my Xmas theme. I have been having fun turning myself into an elf and my husband into a drunk santa using the Greeting card option in FotoFlexor. Obviously this is not for kids given the wine bottle in Santa’s hands (and what hairy hands they are!) They have also added a number of new features since I last visited FotoFlexor such as photo morphing so it continues to be a brilliant online image editing tool.

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Xmasy Innes and Suzie, originally uploaded by suzievesper.

Ok, this is not the best picture I have ever worked on but I did do it in two seconds flat thanks to the online photo editor Picnik. They have a large range of Xmas shapes that can be added to you picture which are easily resized and rotated to fit with the image you are working on. They can take images from a variety of online sources such as Flickr or you can upload directly into Picnik. Thanks Innes for being a model with me! Why not have a go? (and I will still be talking about Zoho Creator very soon).

Well, I have been having a lot of fun with this tool. You can load pictures into Fotoflexor from your computer or from a number of online photo sites where you have photos stored such as Flickr. You can add a LARGE number of special effects to the images. This has to be one of the most comprehensive free image editors that I have seen. It can also work in layers with transparency and has clever tools for selecting part of images. In the picture above, I cut out a photo of my husband from another picture and added the trees as a background. I then blurred the trees slightly to give the picture a ‘depth of field’ effect. I then put in a picture of myself using my built-in webcam and was able to add that picture of myself to some ready made faces. In the above picture, I decided to be the face of Paris Hilton (I look a little purple because I took the photo of my face at night under tungsten lighting). I was able to scale my face to fit hers and move and rotate it until I was happy. I then removed the background of the photo and added it to my scene. This is just a small taste of the many tools that are on offer.One final feature that I really liked is the ability to send the picture back to online libraries such as Flickr or to download the pic to my computer. By saving it as a png, I was able to keep the transparency. It did take quite a long time to save so be patient. Very cool image editing!!

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What Can We Do With Flickr?, originally uploaded by cogdogblog.

Thanks to Ewan (involved in a full day workshop with him today) for showing this great resource. Click on the photo above to be taken to where it is on Flickr. The photo has a number of notes on the image that give you ideas on how to use Flickr and have a number of really useful links. This Flickr user has a number of great ideas in his photostream so have a play through some more of his photos. I have a lot more ideas on how I could use Flickr after today.

Yes - that is a bold statement but I am loving Vuvox!!

It is hard to believe that it is completely free! You can search your photos on Flickr, PhotoBucket or upload them from your computer. You can also do general web searches for images to use. You drag the photos you want to display into your storyboard area and then apply a style to use. Many aspects of each style can be customised to suit your purposes. You can save it to their server and then they give you the ability to embed the code on a wiki page. Way cool!! Click on each of the photos on my ‘emotion tree’ to get a close-up of them (I took these photos years ago - the quality of the photos isn’t all that great which is not Vuvox’s fault)

Meeting Reflections

I have just been to Hastings this week for a two day meeting with other key staff in clusters. I enjoy these meetings as it is a great time to be around like minded people with a real passion for the use of ICT in education. There is so much expertise in the room at these meetings and it is wonderful to be able to swap ideas and information.

For instance, Sara is a facilitator for another cluster and she gave me a handy tip about a piece of software called Umajin that is great for layering images and video (some with the use of blue screening). This is so easy to use and much more affordable than Photoshop and easier than GIMP. They offer discounts for bulk buying and that includes buying through clusters of schools.

Tessa highlighted her great collection of resources on her area in Centre 4 - the managing change section is excellent.

Other than that, I have found a few new things on my own. I have now managed to sign up for Imbee (a safe social network for teachers, parents and children) as they now support New Zealand. I think it looks like a very interesting platform and may use some people in my cluster as ‘children’ guinea pigs (or anyone else that indicates being interested). It would be great if I could get a test group of children involved in a project around this tool. Watch this space…
I am also enjoying looking through the blog and wiki of Wes Fryer. He has a lot of interesting things to say and has fantastic collections of resources including a page on Digital Storytelling.

I also like the layout of Soople which shows you all of the advanced Google search options in a really user friendly format.

Well, that’s about enough from me for the moment To bed!

Comic Life for Windows!

Yes, Plasq has now put out a Beta version of Comic Life so that you can enjoy all of that comic goodness that the Mac community has had over the last few years. A few people did the Comic Life Workshop at the Expo and they were all raving about it so get in and have a go.

The best thing about it being a Beta is that it is free and it has already gone through a few revisions so it is probably fairly stable.

Download it from the Plasq website