It looks like Picasa is a software that does the exact thing that we learned about Picnick except that Picasa has a lot more features. It is exciting to learn that there are out there various options for us as teachers. In fact, going through the article, I found out that we can do a lot more with the pictues we take than just insert them in a PowerPoint slides. At least, on my side because that what I used to use in my classes and it was of a great success.
Reading about the different features of Picasa I thought of using it as another tool for digital story telling, or probably in the virtual projections. In fact, Playing with photos is a tool in itself.
Reading articles about how to implement different technological tools seems very enlightening. However, the challenge that arises here is which one of the tools we can use and how can we use it to fit a particular curriculum. If there is a software that can help us in faciliatating our teaching how can we modify it to different scripts (ex Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, etc).
Being exposed to different kind of technology this week, I found out myself starting from square one: What tool do I really want to use? How can I use it? How can I implement it to fit the five C's of ACTFL ? Do I have to use technology for each lesson? If yes, how can I do it if I have to see five classes a day each with a differnent level? All those are questions that I start asking myself.
To sum up, technlogy is facinating but it is hard to be used on daily basis. It needs a lot of time, work and collaborations to be part of our daily lesson plan.
Technology can indeed become a time-sink. I would suggest that you start small and allow the technology use to grow along the way. Many of the materials you find and use you can reuse later as you keep adding to your arsenal. Sharing is another possibility. If you know other teachers who are developing tech materials, get together with them to share your work. That cuts the prep time in half or more. Collect all your tech materials in one place, such as in a wiki as in the CARLA Institute. And don't forget to have the students do most of the work!
ReplyDeletePicasa is indeed a marvelous tool with most of the capabilities of Picnik, but also with many of the same advantages of Flickr -- you can store your images in folders and publish them to the world or to a private audience.
The issue of non-Latin text has been a perennial problem, but the situation is so much better now than a few years ago. Virtually every word-processor now accommodates unicode fonts -- try it out in Google Docs to see if it works there. I would hope that every Flash-based system would allow you to write in Arabic -- see if you can use an Arabic font in Picnik or Tokbox. I think you would only need to set your keyboard and enter text in the text fields.