I looked at Picnik. This is a photo editing site. I would recommend this for teachers. The positives are that Picnik is free. You can edit red eye, make collages, change lighting, and even share the photos with others. Picnik is set-up so you can easily share them on flickr, picassa, twitter, facebook, and more. I think that in terms of having students use the program it is a good one. The site is easy to navigate. Students will be able to edit their own photos easily and then share them.
There are some negatives of Picnik also,but I don't think they outweigh the positive. The biggest problem I had with Picnik is that a lot of the cooler features are part of the premium so you have to pay more to upgrade. What is offered for free is enough for students to get started. I think that it would need to be discussed that students are not going to share the photos on Twitter or Facebook without permission. I think this could become a problem with older students so it is good to know that the options are there.
The second application I looked at was Zoho Office Suite. I looked at the calendar application because I really felt that this would be helpful to many teachers. I like the calendar. You can view by day, week, or month. Another feature is that you can share what you put into the calendar. There is a specific place where you can put the email of people who you want to remind of the event in your calendar. I think this would be good for things like grade level meetings, conferences, etc. Teachers can use this tool together to help each other. I also like that you can add little information or a whole description. Overall, I really like Zoho Calendar.
I also looked at the Zoho Writer. Zoho writer works similar to Microsoft Word. You can write a document, add images and links also. Your document can be saved to Zoho Writer or to a drive. With Zoho Writer you can change the font size, type, color, and more. Zoho Writer also has word count, spell check, a thesaurus, which are good features when teaching students how to write papers. I think that it would be a good way for students to type for free if you do not have access to Word at your school, but I think that Microsoft Word is still better because this will be used in the real world. It's probably best to expose children to both.
I did not look at any of those so I am glad that you so I could get a beginning insight as to what they have to offer. Thanks
ReplyDeleteI liked Picnik too, but found you could not save you photos there, but could post them on face book or my space or save them to your computer, or photo bucket. I found it easy to crop and fix my pictures, but if I have to save them to photo bucket, I might just as well go there to begin with. I also liked Zoho as they have lots of pretty templates to work with. I was only concerned that you had to be 13 to use it and they can cancel you without notice or reason. I found that to be a problem as I would be at a loss unless I saved everything I did there some where else too.
ReplyDeleteMargie
Have you used Google Calendar before? I've used neither Zoho or Google Calendar so I was wondering which one would be better to learn how to use. Organization is not my strong point so one of these tools might be helpful for me.
ReplyDelete