Tag: photo

Apps, Creative Thinking, Education, K-12, Student Products, Teaching Tools

My Album

Terri Eichholz

Yesterday, I was browsing through the day’s Apps Gone Free (using the app on my iPhone), and was intrigued by the description of “My Album“.  Always a bargain hunter, I was even more interested when I saw that this free app was usually priced at $4.99.  I quickly downloaded it to our school iPad, and started to play with its many features.  I was very impressed. “My Album” allows you to create virtual scrapbook “albums” with as many pages as you like.  On each page, you can add backgrounds, pictures, clip art, text, and even drawing.  You can resize and rotate the pictures, use your own photos as backgrounds or the ones in the app, and choose from dozens of fonts for your text.  The best thing about the app is the many ways that you can share your albums and/or pages.  You can e-mail them in jpg or pdf formats, save them to your iPad Photos, or save them as pdf’s on the iPad.  Oh, and you can include music on your pages (I haven’t explored this feature, yet.)

This is a lot of great stuff in one app.  Your students could use this for creating presentations.  You could use it to keep records of daily class activities in an album to be shared on a blog or printed at the end of the year.  There are lots of ways you can use this in the classroom.

The Help menu is fantastic – with short videos that explain each feature.  You can also go to the developer’s website for a longer video that shows all of the app’s abilities.

I don’t know how long this app will be free.  There is a free version of it in the iTunes store, as well, but I am not certain how it differs from this one.  Get the full version today, if you can!

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3-12, Art, Creative Thinking, Education, Student Products, Teaching Tools, Websites

Dear Photograph

whatimeant2say

Dear Photograph is not an educational site.  It is a collection of photographs of pictures.  In each photograph, the photographer is holding up a picture from the past in front of a scene from the present.  The juxtaposition is striking, and the submissions are accompanied by moving letters to the subjects of the older photos.  The emotions that you find on this site are varied and deep, from nostalgia to regret.  I like the idea of using this concept in the classroom because I think that it could help students to better understand their families.  And if you have some really creative photo editors, they could develop their own versions for historical settings that they are currently studying or for literature.  Using Dear Photograph for a project would be a neat way to encourage empathy and perspective.

Apps, Art, Creative Thinking, Education, K-12, Language Arts, Student Products

WordFoto (Reblog)

Terri Eichholz

For the summer, I have decided to use my Tuesday and Thursday posts to reblog some of my favorite posts that some of my readers may have missed the first time around.  Although this iApp is not free, I think that it is one of the few that is well worth the cost for classroom use.  There are so many applications for it that allow for very creative uses.  Since this post, another project that we did was to import a picture of “Scream” by Edvard Munch, and have the students apply their deepest fears to the picture.  

WordFoto is an iApp ($1.99) with a lot of potential for creative minds.  The app allows the user to either take a picture or load a photo from the device’s Photo Gallery.  Once loaded, the designer can then crop the picture if necessary.  The main appeal, however, is adding words to the picture.  There are sets of words already provided, or a creative mind can provide his or her own.  You can also choose the style by selecting from different themes or creating your own.  In addition, there are some fine-tuning tools to tweak things a bit more.  Below you will find an example of an original photo by one of my 4th graders, and her interpretation using WordFoto.

Original Photo
WordFoto Version

Thanks to Laura Moore, who first brought this app to my attention in her blog!  Be sure to check out her post for ideas on how to use WordFoto in the classroom.

Art, Creative Thinking, Education, K-12, Student Products, Websites

You are Your Words

Terri Eichholz

For those of you who find it appealing to make pictures out of text, as in the iDevice apps TypeDrawing and WordFoto, there is a website that will also perform this function.  You are Your Words, sponsored by American Heritage Dictionary, allows you to upload your photo and text, and meld the two together.  There are some basic controls for changing the contrast and font types.  Once you have created your masterpiece, you can share it on Facebook or Twitter.  You can also download and save it.  An idea for using this might be to have students upload their pics (with parental permission, of course), and choose one or more quotes that they find meaningful.  This would make a great photo gallery in your classroom!