Week 5 - Thing 10

I have spent a lot of time trying out differenct image generators. The easiest one for me to use was Image Chef. There were lots of different choices for making personalized images for fun things but I'm not sure how I would use this in a school setting. The image that is shown above (I'm sorry - I got an error message and was not able to post my pictures!) is one that I sent to my daughter, as if it was from her dog, Jack. I also made a license plate from Image Chef which said PSUWed and sent it to my other daughter, since she is getting married at PSU in June. As I said, these were fun things to do! I used the bowl of alphabet soup to advertise the Martha books by Susan Meddaugh.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to create a mosaic using the FD Toys site. I finally did create a mosaic but my concern with this site is that your pictures must have a URL address to be used. I uploaded my pictures into School Center, which our district uses for our web pages. But, when I copied those URLs into Mosaic Maker it would not accept them since the URL did not end in .jpg or some other picture format. I then had to upload my pictures into Flick but did not want to make them public because they included pictures of students at school. I still could not make the mosaic because the pictures were private. I had to make my pictures public in Flickr to be able to make the mosaic. Since I was trying to do one for our Superintendent, who is retiring in March, and many of the pictures were students, I had to scrap that idea. It seems that this site is only good if you are using scenery pictures. I did create a mosaic of our trip to Alaska but I did not include any pictures of family members. It was just landscape pictures. What a long learning process!!

I have used Trading Cards quite often in FD Toys for our 3rd grade state project. The teachers and students were very pleased with the results. I also used Motivator which creates a poster. We tried using this for the states, as well but decided on the Trading Cards instead. If I use Motivator again, I would have the students find a great picture of their state that would make a person want to visit, make the poster, save it as a jpeg and then paste it into word and have the students add a persuasive writing piece to the bottom of the paper.

There are so many other ways to use these image generators. I am just tapping the surface!