E-learning Toolkit: Using Picasa

For this E-learning toolkit activity, I chose a photo of a lily that I took at Grotto Canyon, close to Canmore, Alberta.  I followed the instructions in the activity pretty much step-by-step and as such, found the usability of Picasa to be intuitive.  On the left is my original photo, in the middle is the cropped photo, and on the right is the re-sized image (500 pixels wide).  Click on each image to view it separately.

The image above (left side) is a photo that I took of graffiti at the Hastings Skateboard Park in Vancouver while visiting my brother a few years ago.  At the time, I used Picasa and the “saturation” effect to enhance this photo.  I was so pleased with the final product that I have enlarged it and framed it.  I have also printed 4 x 6 prints of this photo and have created greeting cards with it.   The photo in the center is a photo that I cropped using Picasa a few years ago, and the last photo, of the Totem, is a photo I took in Seattle that I am just really proud of!  In fact, I have used all of the images above among others in my digital story and in the creation of greeting cards.

For amateur photographers such as myself, Picasa is a great tool to dabble in the editing of photos.  For the most part, I use iPhoto and have found it to be very intuitive and user friendly.  I am more keen to use iPhoto, as my school uses Mac computers, however, since Picasa is open source and cross-platform, I would recommend it to schools that utilize different platforms.  Furthermore, I noticed that you can upload directly to Blogger from Picasa, which would be very handy for teachers and/or students using Blogger as their blogging platform.  Whether people use Picasa, or iPhoto, or any other digital image software suite, it is important to spend the time to “play around” and figure out what the software has to offer.  I find that learning by doing usually produces fantastic results!

Posted: 07|12|09 at 19:59. Filed under: Uncategorized.
Comment | Trackback