WWW – Pics4Learning

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This Week’s Weekly Wednesday Website:

pics4learning

 

 

 http://www.pics4learning.com/

This week’s WWW is Pics 4 Learning, which hosts a library of thousands of images for students and teachers to use in the classroom without worrying about violating copyright law.  All of the photos have been donated to the site with full permission for educational use.  No worries about blocked sites or inappropriate search results ~ everything here is safe for students! 

You can search for specific images or browse by subject.  Download and save the pictures, or use copy-and-paste to insert them into a document.  Perfect for flipcharts, power points, newsletters, and web pages, as well as student projects! 

The quick tips in the Recipe 4 Success tutorial make it easy to use the resources, and citation information is included with each photo so you can teach your students to be responsible users of someone else’s work.  You can also share your own photos in just two easy steps.

   

**As always, a link to this website is posted at http://www.netvibes.com/weeklyweb along with all of my previous Weekly Wednesday Websites.  Note:  I have reorganized the WWW archive to make it easier to use.  Now all of the sites are categorized in separate tabs so you can easily find past favorites.

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WWW – SepiaTown

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septiatown screenshot

 

This week’s WWW (Weekly Wednesday Website) is SepiaTown, a website which is integrated with Google Maps to allow you to view historical photographs in their geographical context, and then compare them to what the area looks like now. 

 

sepiatown sanfrancisco

 

For example, you can click on the thumbnail of a specific location in San Francisco immediately following the great earthquake and fire in 1906, and then use the accompanying Google map to see what the same location looks like now.  Just click on the “then/now” button (see it circled in the screenshot above) in the top right corner above the Google Map.  The screenshot below shows you the comparison.

 

 sepiatown sanfrancisco then now

 

Users are encouraged to upload their own photos to expand the database, which might make an interesting history or geography project for your classroom!

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Flickr Fun: Mash-Ups!

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Boy, there are some really neat Flickr Mash-Ups out there!  This was actually another one of those humbling assignments that made me realize just how much I *don’t* know about the tools that are available on the web.  I just keep repeating to myself, “How do you eat the elephant?  One bite at a time!”

The first application I played with is Montager, which creates mosaics from Flickr photos that are searched out based on a tag name of your choice.  At first I didn’t see a practical use for it, but the more I played with it, the more I realized what a neat tool it is.  It would be a new and creative way to compile photos from a particular event and display them on a website, or you could use it on a school webpage to display photos of your faculty and staff.  (With their permission, of course.)

Next I looked at the Big Huge Labs website and tried out the Captioner application, which allows you to add speech and thought bubbles to your photos.  This caught my attention because I thought students would enjoy seeing photos turned into cartoons.  (In fact, back in the day, I used to buy caption bubble stickers to use on the “real” photos I displayed on my media center bulletin board!)  Here is my creation:

SCASL Apple

Original Image: ‘Yummy Apples
www.flickr.com/photos/23078991@N05/2796325875

Mash-up created with Flickr Toys.

I have two caveats for those who want to use this tool.  First, you cannot upload or import Bitmap photos to be captioned; they need to be in the JPEG format.  The apple photo that I found at Flickr CC was originally a bitmap image, so I had to convert it in order to caption it.  I used my Microsoft Paint program to do that by opening the photo in paint and then saving it, choosing “jpeg” from the Save drop-down file type menu.  Easy and free!

Second, you need to start with a large image because the caption bubbles are too big to fit onto a small photo.  You can shrink it down after you’ve created and saved it to whatever size you want to use.  I had originally saved my apple photo using the “small” option, so I had to go back to the Flickr site and re-save it as a large photo.

 

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