Erin’s Educational Technology Journey

I have had a digital camera for over 7 years, and my latest camera can take nice 30-second mini-movies with sound in addition to snapshots. However, I’m still not “on top” of the video editing software because I purchased my camera in Japan. All of the installation software is in Japanese, and shows up on my computer as a series of blips and code. Needless to say, I’ve been a fan of Windows Media Center and Windows Photo Gallery simply because I could understand it!

In this toolkit activity, I was asked to explore Picasa, so I downloaded Picasa 3 and instantly understood how to import pictures from Windows to Picasa! It was so simple. I was not excited about Picasa because I’ve been using Windows for so long, but I noticed one thing right awa: It’s easy!

I followed the link to the YouTube video explaining how to crop and resize photos. I decided to make a photo collection as an anniversary gift for my husband. Ambitious, but Picasa made it seem easy. I quickly spent a few hours organizing photos, retouching, cropping, playing with colour tones, adding text and generally having a great time in Picasa. I’ve now edited 12 photos for my anniversary gift, and I’ve decided to move on from “collection” to “publication”. I invested in a lovely photo book months ago, but never thought I’d be able to fill it so quickly. Although Picasa is a great web 2.0 tool for digital photos, it also prints off beautiful photos if you have a quality printer and proper photo paper. What I thought would be a huge “crafty” task ended up being a great way to practice my educational technology skills for school. I’m now fairly adept at editing, re-touching, organizing and sharing photos in ways that seem to be light speed ahead of Windows applications.

How intensive was this activity? At first I thought it would be time consuming, and I thought I’d get frustrated with file sizes, file transfers from Windows and generally learning a new system. However, it was very intuitive and in under one hour I was well on my way, engrossed in a project with a purpose. I’d recommend this toolkit activity to anyone who is frustrated with their current level of digital photo management. The learning curve is not that steep and the results are well worth it! In fact, I was planning on taking photos on my memory stick to my local Kodak kiosk and having the part-time workers print off a collection  for me. To export to my blog, I had to first export the photo to a file on my computer, then I could upload it to my blog. If you use “Blogger”, Picasa has a photo uploader which works directly from the program.

With Picasa, I can personalize photos and make them truly memorable without having to invest too much: A little extra ink, some quailty photo-paper and some time! I used Picasa to edit tourists out of the left of the shot, to blur the focus and to change the tint to yellow to get an “antique” look.

A trip to Macau in Dec 2008