Some great links I’ve collected over the last couple of months:
Picnik - online image editing
Picnik is a fantastic online image-editing application. You can upload images from your computer, or pull images into Picnik from Flickr, Facebook or Picasa. It even allows you to search Flickr for photos from inside the web application, narrowing your search down to Creative Commons images if you wish (so that you can legally modify and redistribute derivative works). Once you’ve opened up an image, you can perform basic image manipulation on it from inside your browser - crop, rotate, resize, brightness, contrast - and more sophisticated changes like removing red-eye, or sharpening the image. There are even some nice effects - black and white, sepia, vignette, frames and so on - that you can apply to your image, and text and diagram tools to annotate your pictures. Once you’re done you can reexport back up to Flickr or download to your computer.
A basic account for Picnik is completely free. A premium account at $24.95 / year, gives you more effects. It’s really interesting to see more and more feature-rich, intuitive applications moving from the desktop to online. Picnik is brilliant - check it out.
There’s more Flickr-related fun at fd’s Flickr toys - a huge set of tools for playing with your Flickr photos to make posters, calendars, CD covers, you name it. If you aren’t using Flickr yet, what kept you? It’s the best image-sharing application on the web.
Zamzar - file conversion
Zamzar is a really useful online tool to have in your armoury for converting file types from one to another with minimum of fuss. We’ve all come across a situation where a particular application exports files of one type, but we need them to be another type. Really frustrating. Zamzar seems to convert pretty much any file format to any other appropriate file format. All you do is upload your starter file, and once the conversion has been completed, you’ll receive an email link to download the converted file.
Zamzar also allows you to download videos from popular video-sharing sites (like Youtube), so even if these sites are blocked in school, as they invariably are, you can extract the videos to your computer or to a USB stick for using in lessons. CLC Space Days have been spiced up with the Top Gear Reliant Robin Space Shuttle video clip using this feature.
Very clever, very slick, and free.
VoiceThread.com
I really like VoiceThread. You can think of it as being like a collaborative online version of PhotoStory, but this doesn’t really do it justice. You upload a series of images, and can then comment on them using text or audio narrations from a microphone. Other users whom you invite to participate in your presentation can then add their own comments. What you end up with is an online dialogue about images. It would be fantastic for history projects, bringing in different generations of the same family to share their thoughts on an old family photo.
Once your voicethread is complete, you can share it easily in a blog posting (something that the limited file formats from PhotoStory make very difficult . . .) or just email the link to a friend to watch it.
To get a clearer idea of what VoiceThread is all about, watch their “What is a VoiceThread?” voicethread!
