Digital Story Telling: Pictures and Audio

Ok so this week we have been working on picture editing.  I'm not going to lie I may have been playing around with the different sites to avoid working on other homework.  I don't see this as a waste of time though.  For one I am practicing what I learnt in class, and two I'm beginning to develop an assignment for my next placement.  Different sites offer different options for editing photos.

One we looked at has recently become an app for smart phones called Aviary.  Apparently I have this app on my phone.  I'm pretty sure that my sisters had downloaded it for me.  Although I may have only used this app once, now that I am more familiar with it I just might find myself using it more often.  

One site that I know will come in handy is Pixlr.  This site allows you to blur out parts of your picture.  If you are wanting to post a picture but someone in the photo has not given permission or does not want to be recognized this site allows you to blur out faces.  I recently used this to blur out a product label, although this proved to be irrelevant with how the editing process went:

original:

edited: 

With a few clicks I had a new picture.

Some of the other sites are:
- Ribbit
- PhotoFunia
- Citrify
- BeFunky

Here is an example of one I edited of one of my sisters and I using Tuxpi:
before:

 After:

I think this skill is a good one to teach students because it is one they can use when creating posters for projects or promotions.  The students can get creative.  

One of the assignments I have created for my next placement requires my students to prepare a presentation about a cause they are passionate about.  For some of their visuals, students could edit their photos to add meaning.  

I am so excited to see how creative my students will get incorporating photo editing into their assignment.

Another tool we looked with photo editing is how to create your own video with the edited videos.  As a class we were to finish the saying Learning is ...., find a photo to represent your saying and edit the photo for added effects.  When all the photos are sent to one person, in this case the teacher, they can upload the photos to different programs; Movie Maker for PC's and iMovie for Macs.  When the photos are uploaded to the program you have choices of what you want to do.  You could add different transitions between slides, add music, adjust music level to match audio if audio is included, if you do include audio and say your students needed two takes you are able to delete the part that was messed up, add time or decrease time between slides, and more options that I am yet to discover.

I have so many ideas for how I could use this in my classroom.  This could be used as an exit slip where students say a comment and after editing I could play it as a review of the previous class, for assemblies, to show parents what we are working on in class by displaying it on the classroom website, or having students include this kind of technology in their presentations.  The possibilities are endless.

~ Miss Laing