Tag: images

Better than Wordle? Try Word Mosaics

2
April 14, 2010
by Mark

Application: Word Mosaics

We all love Wordle and we have found heaps of uses for that particular web app. For the classroom they are great. They’re eye catching, fun and a great visual aid. However, there is another application which is just like Wordle, but adds another dimension. Word Mosiacs is part of the Image Chef website and just like Wordle will list randomly words that are inputted. The twist comes when you can then put those words into shapes. Here’s one that I made in a matter of moments – ‘Nothing Without Joy’ is mantra that my boss often uses and was, for some reason, the first thing that came to my head. I like the avenues of sharing your creations. You can Facebook it, Tweet it, MySpace it (what?) and even embed into blogs or other web pages. You can also save the image, something that Wordle can’t do at the moment.

I suggest that you have a look for some fun and visually stimulating effects that take word usage another step up from Wordle.

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Popularity: 26% [?]

: Literacy, Resources, Tools
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Five Card Flickr

1
March 25, 2010
by Mark

Application: Five Card Flickr 2555451906_9266de66fb.jpg

If you are a teacher that needs to constantly find new and engaging ways to engagers writers in your classroom, can I suggest that you have a look at Five Card Flickr? The premise is simple – five random images are shown on a screen. The idea is that the reader then becomes the writer. Taking the images shown, students then write, trying to link and weave a story through the five images. It can sometimes be harder than it seems. These are truly randomly assembled images. There appears no link at all for the writer to follow – it’s entirely up to them.   

A word of caution – because the images are random, there is no way of knowing exactly what you will get. You will get images that are tagged with 5cardflickr – and there are over 1200 of them. I would suggest that if you are working with junior grades that you preload the images onto your board. I haven’t come across anything so far, but I can’t guarantee all images.

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” E.L. Doctorow

Popularity: 13% [?]

: Literacy, Resources, Tools
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Bing Earth Day Photo Contest

1
March 11, 2010
by Mark

Picture 3.jpg

Here’s an opportunity for educators in the US to give some purpose to their student’s education. Bing has just announced a photo contest for students to submit photos to be considered for their background image to commemorate Earth Day 2010. Announced at NCCE Seattle the contest will start on March 29 and is open to US students only. The winning photo will be used as the background to the Bing search engine on Earth Day, April 22nd.

Prizes are offered for individual students and schools.

  • 1st place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Lab” for their school.
  • 2nd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Kit” for their school.
  • 3rd place prizes: Individuals receive an HP Pavilion desktop and monitor and a “Digital Photo Starter Set” for their school.

Four age groups are open for entries (ages 5-10, 11-13, 14-17 and 18+) with winners from each age group will travel to the Microsoft Campus to help select images for other Bing homepages. As an extra there’s an incentive for the voters.

There’s a great opportunity to help other classrooms in need during the voting stage from April 13th to the 19th. Bing will give a $5.00 GivingCard for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote each day. Voters can then decide what classroom projects (like math, science, art, reading) will benefit from Bing’s donation. If you do the math, we’re talking up to $100,000 a day to help schools across the country. Each day you can return to the site to cast another vote and have an opportunity to pick up another GivingCard.(Source)

To find out all the details of the contest and how to vote visit the Earth Day Photo Contest website (http://www.earthdayphotocontest.com)

Popularity: 5% [?]

: Admin
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Getting Lost in the Tag Galaxy

0
October 27, 2009
by Mark

Application Source: Tag Galaxy

Tag Galaxy is a fun and interactive way to browse for photos and images on Flickr The site is flash based that firstly prompts you for a tag to search for.  Once entered, the browser window (which incidentally can be toggled full screen) appears with planets labeled with further tags rotating around the ‘sun’ which is your searched tag.  See image below.

From there you can specify and narrow your search.  In this example clicking ‘NBA’ brings a pink sun.  Hovering your mouse over this allows me to see that there are (currently) 36,537 tagged photos with basketball+nba.  Clicking on the ‘sun’ narrows in on the planet and pulls together an impressive sphere of these photos.

The sphere can be navigated through by using your mouse.  Choosing one of the photos brings the image into clearer focus and a larger, individual position. 
Clicking once again on the image, brings to the reader the photo’s meta data and a link to the Flickr page it can be found on.

Summary
Tag Galaxy provides a creative and interactive way to search for images on Flickr.  It also directs you directly to an image, allowing you to see similarly tagged photos.  I recommend having a play with this site, if only to see the cool flash animations when searching.

Popularity: 2% [?]

: Resources
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Earth Album

0
October 5, 2009
by Mark

Application: Earth Album

Came across this little gem of a site late last week. Earth Album is no fuss mashup site that is low on the pretty graphics (the header is a plain text image) but high on the content. And it works well too. Using Flickr, it’s a world map that integrates with the photos tagged in certain areas. A very good thing if you are teaching geography. There’s also a CoolIris plug-in for those who are using Firefox or Flock.

Earth album is a simpler, slicker Flickr mash-up that allows you to explore some of the most stunning photos in the world courtesy of Google maps and Flickr. To begin your journey, just click somewhere on the map, e.g. “India”. Note– since the top Flickr images are used, the images change every few weeks; bookmark this site and check back for a different experience in a month!

There are a few ways of navigation. You can click on any country or place around the world and 12 images will appear. Below is the screen that appeared when I clicked on Australia.

sydney.jpg

Clicking on any one of those images will then display a more detailed photo and information window as shown. Clicking on the hyperlink will take you to the image on Flickr

sandydesert.jpg

The other option of navigation appears in the top menu bar (shown below) labelled ‘Jump to’ of which the web author writes;

earthalbummenubar.jpg

I placed the “Jump to place” bar in the upper right-hand corner of the page. You can type in pretty much any kind of address in the bar; it uses Google’s reverse-geolocation functionality to jump you to the right place in the world. For example, you can type anything from “Egypt” to “Hawaii” to “Sydney” to a particular address in the world. Based on what you type, it will try to guess whether what you typed is a country or a city and jump you to that place automatically.

I typed in my home town of Melbourne there and got this enhanced view of Victoria. As you can see there’s still some issues of relevancy (I’m not sure Melbourne = Cat), bit I do like that 9 of 10 it’s pretty close.

melbourneearthalbum.jpg

Classroom Use: Teachers of geography will see an immediate use for this in their lessons, particularly with an Interactive Whiteboard. Alternatively, any lesson on location or countries of the world will benefit from this site, as will students of all levels doing a project on a particular local. I’m impressed with the way the site narrows in on a location, very good for a student perspective of who they are in the world – especially with the more junior levels.

Popularity: 10% [?]

: IWBs
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Five Top Image Sites For Education…and then some

3
September 16, 2009
by Mark

I’m sure that we’ve all had student who, when wanting a picture simply hop onto Google Images and do a search. Easy way to do it, but certainly not the quickest, easiest, safest or perhaps the most legal. So, on offer here are five sites that provide free, quality images that you can use with your students – without the fear of legal ramifications or content worries. The list below is in no particular order.

1. Sunipix (www.sunipix.com)  

sunipix.jpg

Sunipix is a picture library for students, teachers, architects, website designers, advertising and marketing executives, civil engineers, business executives, travel agents, government agencies, and media/Information Technology professionals. Sunipix provides royalty free photographs (100 DPI) free of charge for personal and business needs.

2. Public Domain Pictures (www.publicdomainpictures.net)

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Pictures are organised into an easy to navigate menu. There is an option for an account, but this is not necessary for downloading the images.

PublicDomainPictures.net is a repository for free public domain photos. You can upload your own pictures and share your work with others.

If you intend to use an image you find here for commercial use, please be aware that no model release was obtained and pictures featuring products or property should be used with care.

The pictures are free for you to use and you should feel good about doing so.

3. Every Stock Photo (www.everystockphoto.com)

EverystockPhoto

This is probably the most ‘modern’ looking of photo sites with tag clouds, a window for your current collection, feature searches, blog, and a forum. If you’re thinking of using photo sites with students be aware of having a ‘safe search’. Every Stock Photo recently posted;

We are a search engine for free photos. These come from many sources and are license-specific. You can view a photo’s license by clicking on the license icon, below and left of photos. Membership is free, without advertising, and allows you to rate, tag, collect and comment on photos.

Our default sorting algorithm favors popularity heavily. As a result, over the last year, salacious photos, across all searches, have been floating up. Obviously popular with some, they are offensive to others! To combat this, we introduced a “safe search” mode, which filtered out photos marked as NSFW. This was off by default. Due to increasing feedback from users, we are changing safe search to default to ON. you can turn it OFF via the advanced search, or in your user search preferences. We are also making sure that safe search mode applies across all the website features.

As a teacher searching for images to use, this probably would be my favoured site, however I would exercise caution when allowing students access.

4. Images For Education (www.imagesforeducation.org.uk)

JISC Header

This site is specifically for education and has a focus on history. The nice thing is that this site has both moving and still images.

An unrivalled online image library, comprising over 500 hours of film and 56,000 photos, will be available free of charge for at least 25 years to UK higher and further education institutions from Summer 2010.

Following £2.5 million in funding from JISC and a competitive procurement process during the first months of 2009, eleven high-quality image collections have been licensed by JISC Collections as part of the Digital Images for Education initiative.

The key emphasis is on bringing to life “Our History” – in particular, film and digital images that capture local history, UK history and world history during the last 25 years.

5. PD Photo (www.pdphoto.org)

PD Photo header

This site has some wonderful images. The web author Jon has a love for photography and has kindly put his images onto the web for the bigger world.

PDPhoto.org is a repository for free public domain photos. Unless something is clearly marked as being copyrighted, you can assume it is free to use. But if you intend to use an image you find here for commercial use, please be aware that standards for such use are higher. Specifically, you should assume no model release was obtained. And pictures featuring products or property should be used with care. The photos are here to be used, but I don’t want you to get either of us in trouble over it.

Some Extra Sites

As a nice little bonus here’s five other places that you can look too.

  1. http://www.freeimages.com/
  2. http://www.burningwell.org/
  3. http://www.openphoto.net/
  4. http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/free_stock_photos/
  5. http://www.sxc.hu/ – free and paid

Popularity: 5% [?]

: Resources
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