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A friend of mine who now works for Picnik (or should I say Google seeing that Picnik was recently purchased by them), the online photo editing website passed along these little suggestions this week.

New for Back to School
We just launched some handy tools that make it easy to create photo-personalized blog headers, newsletters, desk name tags, and class photo frames. It’s as easy as dragging photos into our back to school templates. Really, it’s that easy–and these back to school templates are free. Learn more.

Get and share ideas about Picnik in class
Thanks to suggestions from teachers around the world, we’ve also put together a list of suggested Picnik activities to use with your students. We’re always looking for more innovative ways to use the product in school, so if you have any ideas, please share them in the educator section of our Feedback Forum.

If you haven’t used Picnik before you are in for a treat. Straight forward simple, and loads of options. Create a class account and have your kids editing pictures like a pro in no time flat!

Flickr Logo by ipodfan1.Of course I’m talking about a Flickr Pro Account. Flickr has to be the one website that I would say is definitly worth the $25 you’ll spend and can benefit every teacher in the school. There is no way, I don’t care how big or small your school is that for $25 you can create, maintain, and support:

  • Unlimited uploads and storage
  • Unlimited sets and collections
  • Access to your original files

That word unlimited is where it’s worth its weight in gold. We’re in our second year of using Flickr here at ISB and we’ve found it so useful that we bought three accounts one for the Elementary, Middle School, and High School. Yes, that’s right we’ve spend a whopping $75 just to keep the levels separate. Of course the elementary teachers are using it the most and training them to create a set using their name was easy….much easier than teaching them how to resize a photo for their blog or newsletter.

But of course that’s not all you get with Flickr. Once the pictures are on the web you can then push them out to any website you want using their embeddable slideshow. So for example you can have the latest pictures from PreK filing your website.

In the Elementary each grade level team has created a set called “Grade Level Slideshow” any pictures put in this set when uploaded end up in the slide shows they have embedded on their class blogs. Some teachers have done this just for their class as well.

And if unlimited space, and the ability to show photos in numerous ways on numerous web pages isn’t enough for you. How about allowing parent access to download the size and quality of picture they want to keep. Parents can access the pictures and download them to their computer for safe keeping. No longer do you the teacher have to send home a CD of pictures for the year. The parents are now in control of that throughout the school year and only keep the pictures they want.

Know Your School Rules:
Of course right away if you visit our Flickr accounts above you’ll notice we have all our pictures open to the public and we show student faces. If teachers are following the rules you shouldn’t find any names however. This of course leads to understanding and knowing your school rules for picture usage. Some schools don’t allow student faces on the web, while others do without names and of course there is all sorts of gray area in between. Understand what your school allows and then just follow those rules. It’s pretty easy and quick to learn to take pictures of the back of kids, or over their shoulders real quick. Or quickly bring a photo into some sort of photo editing program and apply a filter that distorts the faces.

Create a Friend Account:
If you do want to allow parents access to pictures of students at school, a simple work around is to create another Flickr account and make it a “friend” of the school account. This of course opens up other issues such as now they can upload pictures to that friend account, and if someone leaks the password within the school community well, it might as well be public.

In the end there are ways around these issues and for $25 you really can’t go wrong. Unlimited space to store photos….that’s just crazy!!