PhotoPeach

Here's another website that can be used to make photo slideshows. It's called PhotoPeach and it seems pretty easy to use, and like my favourite websites it's free!

You can upload photos yourself, or take them from a set added to Flickr or Facebook. It doesn't look as flash as Animoto, and there is less choice of music. But it does seem quicker to use and compared to the free version of Animoto you can use more than 15 photos. You can add text captions to each image if you want. Slideshows can then be embedded into your blog or Facebook profile. Here's a nice guide to making a slideshow on PhotoPeach from Allanah King.

As an example, here's a slideshow I made this morning of some photographs of my home town, that I took on a few walks along the seafront last Summer.

Here's the slideshow as a regular slideshow



And here's the slideshow as a "Spiral" which is an interesting way of browsing a stack of photographs and would work well on an IWB in full screen mode.



There are many different ways you could use this. One would be photo montages of images to introduce a topic. Students could take photos around their school or on school trips/field trips. Language teachers could add captions to images to teach vocabulary. Maybe present a series of images from a digital microscope and ask the students to guess what each thing is.You could even use it as another way to do digital storytelling

If you already have a Flickr account it's really quick to produce a PhotoPeach slideshow. Head over there now and try it out.

The Big Picture

One of the nice things about using an interactive whiteboard is that it gives you the chance to use high-quality images. The fact that you can project digital images is much better than having to use overhead projectors and acetates, and much easier to use than a slide projector.

You can make an impressive start to a lesson by having a dramatic or inspiring image up on the screen as the students come into the room. The image may be something that can spark debate or discussion. They may illustrate a particular point, or be used as a stimulus for some creative writing or project work.

Recently, a fellow twitterer digitalmaverick posted a link to a fantastic set of photos from The Boston Globe of London at night, as seen from above. There are some truly breathtaking photos of a city I know very well at street level. Seeing it from a few hundred feet brings a whole new perspective on things. And as Digitalmaverick says, also makes you think about how much energy is being wasted on lights that could be switched off.


This section of the Boston Globe is called The Big Picture, and you can search its archive for more excellent images on a range of topics. There are fantastic ice sculptures, images of the Sun and The Earth from Above to name just a few. These pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope just blow me away, as do these Cassini photos.

I'm sure there are many lessons you teach that could be enhanced by some of these amazing images. Go there now and take a look! The site even has an RSS feed so you can add them to your RSS reader and keep track of the updates. The site seems add a new page of images every few days, so it's worth going back again and again.

Tilt Shift Maker

Tilt shifting is a way of processing a photograph so that it appears to be a model instead of the real thing.

I've always been amazed by the fact that just adding a blur to parts of the photograph changes the whole way the brain processes the image and makes you think you are looking at a model.

Previously, if you've wanted to make a tilt-shift image, you had to play around with blurs and masks or filters in Photoshop. But now there's a website that lets you produce them almost instantly.



Tilt Shift Maker lets you upload an image, or choose one from the internet. You can process images directly from Flickr if you give it the URL of the image. The image above is my attempt at a Tilt Shifted BETT.

The whole process is very quick. You can preview your image before you produce the final version, and then save it to your computer. There's even a Flickr group of images produced by the website which you can add your finished image to if you wish.

Try it out now; http://tiltshiftmaker.com

Bett Day 2 Photos

Here are some of my photos from my second day at BETT. I had a little bit more time to go around the show and see some of the things I'd only glanced at briefly the day before.

Tanya shows off version 2 of Smart's Senteo software with much better reporting built in. You can download v2 right now from Smart's website.

2DIY - a great new piece of software from 2Simple. Aimed at KS1 you can get them to create and share their own Flash games. Very easy to produce something fun!

Task Magic. Quickly produce a bank of interactive resource from one set of inputted text.

Am-Igo from Clasus. Smart Notebook with the serial numbers filed off....

BETT Day 1 Photos

Just back from my first day at BETT. This was a short run around the exhibition to get a feel for what's there. I'm going back tomorrow to take a more detailed look at everything and also to attend TeachMeet.

Here are some photos of a few things that caught my eye.



Smart were showing off their Smart Table. Nice for small group work



And Microsoft were showing off Surface, a similar piece of kit.



ActivSoftware Inspire Edition running in Primary mode. And also, interestingly, running on a Smartboard. I guess they're showing it will run on any board. Take note, Hitachi users.



And the same ActivSoftware Inspire running in secondary mode. Ably demonstrated by Laura ;)

The rest of my BETT photos can be found here.

Animoto

Thanks to Ewan at EduBlogs for linking to a great little resource called AniMoto. It creates professional-looking video slideshows from your photos. I am too tight to stump up for the full version yet, but I have been playing with the free version that lets you make short 15 second clips.

Here's my first video. It's taken some of my photos from my Flickr stream showing my ski holiday last year. It took about 5 mins to set up and about 5 mins for the whole thing to render. I like the finished result though.

It then gives you the code to embed it in your blog. I'm hoping this works and that below you can see the video.