Photo+Tools+and+Software

toc media type="custom" key="5995431" Unfortunately, photo hosting sites like Flickr and Photobucket, are often blocked by many school districts due to the very real possibility of students accessing inappropriate images. What can a teacher do to provide students access to appropriate photos for their projects? Consider creating a gallery of photos in a wiki like this one (see the Butterfly page), specifically tailored to your assignment. Even though your storage space will be limited (this wikispace is limited to 2 gb), you should be able to upload more than enough photos for students to choose from. If the photos won't be printed, you can limit your photo and file size and the pics will still look good in PowerPoint presentations, word documents, or even a PhotoStory as long long as zooming in is carefully limited. Additionally, there are a number of kid friendly images at Pics4Learning.com

For editing photos, teachers often don't have access to sophisticated photo editing programs. No problem...use what you already have on hand. Microsoft Office Picture Manager that comes on most Windows computers and even PowerPoint and Word can be used to edit photos. For that matter, PhotoStory also has some basic photo editing capability.

Dumpr
Dumpr has several options you can use on your digital photos. Registration is free and necessary if you want to save the new images to your computer. The site says that you can email the photos to others, but I have not had any luck getting the email to go through while in the district. Even easier is to save the file to your computer and email it or put it in a presentation or whatever else you want to do with it. Perhaps it will work from home. Here's a couple of sample for you. I used the same picture of my dog, Rowdy in each.

Picnik
Picnik is another great photo editing site you will want to check out. It has many of the photo fixing tools that you might need - crop, rotate, resize, sharpen, exposure, red-eye fix, and more PLUS there are loads of text options, effects and stickers to add to your pictures. Here's Rowdy with a crown since he thinks he's King at our house.
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befunky
And if you still need another way to really have a lot of fun with your photos, try befunky.com where you can turn your digital photos into artwork. There are over 50 free photo effects that you can apply and loads of 'goodies' to add to your pics. There's no registration required. They also have a blog with a lot of useful information.

Paint.net
Paint.net is a really cool photo editing program ...sort of a Paint program on steroids. It supports multiple layers but is much easier to use than GIMP. If you would like to do more with your photos than just crop, resize, adjust basic qualities like contrast and brightness, etc. take a look at this program.