This week will prove to be a busy one! I will be out of the office two days. Tuesday, October 26th, I will be in Frankfort at the KySTE (Kentucky Society for Technology in Education) training. On Friday, October 29th, I will be in Christian County/Todd County for the monthly Regional TIS (Technology Integration Specialist) meeting. On Wednesday after school, I will be involved with the STLP (Student Technology Leadership Program) at the middle school. We are working on digital art as our focus this month and will be attending the STLP Regional Showcase in Murray where we will display their results. The rest of my week will be filled with working on Infinite Campus issues; the Civil Rights Data Collection, Part II; working on our SchoolLoop Website and helping teachers create their own pages; working on the November edition of my District TRT newsletter; etc. It will certainly be a busy, but fulfilling week!
Since our CCMS STLP is focusing on digital art, I thought this week I would share some sites that enable you to manipulate photos. Sometimes we don't think about using technology in traditional art classes, but this is a way you can integrate technology into an art classroom, even at a young age since most of these sites are easy to use.
http://pixenate.com/ - Pixenate is the photo editor of choice. It is a powerful, flexible photo editing program right from the Web. Simply choose your image to edit and upload it. You can then crop, resize, flip, rotate, normalize and enhance, add light, fixing crooked pics, fixing red eye, whitening, changing saturation and hue, and even doodle on it! There are also many fun effects to choose from. When you’re done, you can save the picture to your own computer or upload it to Flikr (if you have an account). You can also turn the picture into a gift using Pixenate’s partner site, Zazzle.
http://mypictr.com - Are you looking for a way to make a picture for a profile or social network? Upload any picture to this site, then choose the size and selection. Select the Network (i.e. Facebook, Skype, Blogger, etc.) and then select “pictrit”. You can then decide whether to e-mail your picture to yourself or download it to your computer.
http://wetfloormaker.com/ - Here’s another site that you can use to upload and change a picture, but this one is different in that it produces an image that is “reflected”. First browse and upload your picture. Then change the angle, camera height, brightness, reflectivity, sky color and floor color and size. Generate the image as you go to see the changes. Once you are satisfied with your picture, you can save it to your computer.
http://roundpic.com/ - Use this tool to make rounded corners for images. Simply upload your image and click Round it! You can then select which corners to round, the size of the rounded corners, the size of your image and the quality. You can also select a background color or whether or not to make your picture a transparent PNG image. Once your image is done, you can download it to your computer.
http://avs4you.com/ - This site has downloadable software to do all sorts of things to images, videos, audio files, etc. The software is free, but basically only for Windows XP, Windows 7 or Vista operating systems. For each software piece, you can click on Features overview or Overview to read about what the program can do and what the requirements are to download and use it.
