Editing Images

Thanks to Matthew who has spent some time looking at a range of free online image editors to manipulate photographs. He found the most user friendly and yet functional is FotoFlexer. It has all the expected features such as crop, rotate, resize and red eye removal as well in the ‘geek’ (advanced) section a smart cut out tool which enables you to layer pictures. Alternatively, if you prefer to work offline you can download another free program called IrfanView which also has a range of editing tools. Once you are happy with the results you can create your own slide shows adding special effects, music, narration or text using MS Photostory 3. Finally finish off by investigating some of the amazing 360 degree panoramas at Panoramas.dk

Historical Images

The heritage explorer site offers a theme-based collection of free to use historical images. Many of the images are linked to specific national curriculum related topics and are supported by lesson ideas and activities. All images have supporting text and can be saved, downloaded or printed in a range of sizes. 

King’s Cross 1925

Christmas is Coming!

Now that December is here and we can officially turn our thoughts to Christmas, why not take this opportunity to add some festive entries to the new SWGfL Media Gallery. Get you pupils creating their own festive images using collage and scanners, digital cameras or graphics software and upload them to the Festivals and Celebrations area of the gallery. Not onle could you win a Digital Movie Creator (DCM3) for your school, but your images could be added to the SWGfL Postroom to be sent as e-cards.

Full Competition Details here.

Safe Image Searching

Following on from a previous entry ‘Online Image Search’ there is some good technical advice from ICT Nuggets on making Google images (a little) safer. See article. There is also a list of alternative websites for searching for images.

In addition, E2BN (SEGfL) have launched a gallery of copyright free downloadable images. 

 

Online Image Search

If children are searching for images, Google Images can come up with some inappropriate thumbnails even when quite innocent search terms are used and even with strict search on (to activate strict search click on ‘Advanced Image Search’ and next to ’safe search’ select ‘Use Strict Filtering’). 

Instead try using freefoto which has a range of high quality photographs of places and objects. As there are no people in any of the photographs none of the images are inappropriate.

Supplied by FreeFoto.com

It used to be possible to drag and drop Freefoto images straight into software applications such as Textease or Smart Notebook. It appears that this feature is now disabled. Does anybody know why or how to enable it again?  

For details on how to ensure that safe search is set on all computers in school please see the entry on ICT Nuggets.