Images - What do they offer our learners?

Flickr:

I decided to establish an account with Flickr, as it was free and I'm sure I will use it in the future. Setting up this account was very simple. While exploring the website, I had trouble finding and understanding the Creative Commons permissions and copyright notices. It took some research to understand what photos I would be able to freely use, and found that photos under the non-commercial liscenses would be best for me to use. Flickr actually has a search you can do of only these type of images. I found this very useful and time saving.

This is an image I managed to find on Flickr of a chosen topic, and saved it to my desktop. This took only a couple of minutes, and was very easy to do.

Flickr is a simple website suitable for teachers to use to gather photos. It is definitly not suitable for students to freely explore as it is not scanned for inappropriate images, often coming up with photos of a rude or inappropriate nature. This is a major downside to the website. To overcome this, the Learning Manager could create a folder on the schools database, and provide learners with a wide range of photos for them to easily access. Photos of all different sorts would be need to be supplied to encourage creativity and provide for individual likes and needs.

MobaPhoto:

As I always have trouble resizing and editing photos, I chose to download this program. It was free and quick to download, and extremely user friendly!

<- Here is an image of the screen for the resizing of images. This was so simple to do. All it asks you to do is select the images you want to resize, and what you will be doing with the images. It then resizes the images, depending on the intended use. You then choose a location to resave the images. It was so quick, and so simple. I am very impressed! You can also edit your pictures in terms of colour (making the images red, or green ect), rotation, contrast, brightness and crop, ect. This was also very simple to do.

I think that this program could definitly be taught to Primary aged learners, to enhance their ICT skills and abilities to edit and use a range of images.

I honestly cannot see any negative aspects of this tool - it is free, easy to use, and very useful, and you are able to edit many photographs at once. The only slight downside is that resized images are not of the same high-quality.

Key benefit: MobaPhoto can be saved onto a USB stick. So, instead of downloading the program to all needed computers which may not have administartive rights, it can used from a USB stick.

Image Manipulation:

I set up an account with the program Picnik, which is available here . It was easy to do, and simple to use. The site is very engaging, and the directions are clear. Sign up is free. You can choose to either download an image, or use one of their demo ones. I downloaded one from my own collection, to make the experience more personal. Once you have downloaded an images, the instructions and tasks are very clear, with simple instructions of how to use each function. Below is a screen capture of when I was editing my picture.

You can also use the create function to add a range of things to your image: texts, pictures (flowers, tiaras, clothes, different themes, ect), frames and so much more. Doing this was a lot fun, and I think children would really enjoy doing this as well. It was very simple to use.

When you have finished, you save the file following simple directions. You can even upload your edited photo onto your Flickr account following a link on the page. Unfortunately, when it came time for to do this, I had some technical errors with my computer, which ment I lost my image. This is part of using an unpredictable computer.

Exploring the pedagogy use of images, I found there needs to be purpose to providing the children with the image, not just for decoration, or only used to simply "engage" the students. They should be used to enage the learners in higher order thinking skills, and encourage them to interact with an idea/theme, and challenge their way of thinking, ir order to enhance knoweldge and understanding.

What ways have you seen images used in your prac classrooms, or what ways have you used them? Are they able to enhance learning? If so, in what way?