Name: Saturday, October 27, 2007
Picasa or Getty Images?
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THE LYNDEELina,Lydia,Wendy
Web Tool 1: Picasa
Picasa is basically a programme that Google provides to just help organize, sort and edit photos. And so you ask, why would Early Childhood teachers need a programme like that. Well, Teachers like us are responsible with the child’s development and teaching is only a part of the job of an early childhood educator. In fact, we have to take pictures of children be it to keep sake for the parents and also to serve as evidence when observations are made.
And why would we recommend Picasa again? So imagine this scene, you have 20 children, and you have to a pile of pictures of them for the observations made. On top of that, you have your own photos taken with your friends and family. Imagine the number of photos you have in the end. But with Picasa, you can actually sort out your photos according to the friends and children.
To add on with that, Picasa also has information of the time, date, and type of camera used, size and more! And we know that the pictures don’t always come out perfect and sometimes the lightning of the place seems to be too dark. Well, Picasa is also a photo editing programme.
You can actually edit the photos, change its tone and add effects; you can also crop it or turn it to the angle you want it to be in just a click! Captions can also be just added in Picasa and parents can actually see the captions when you send it to them via email or when you post it on the blog.
This way, photos you want to print for your class or parents can easily be edited to your perfection. Isn’t that easy? If you have too much photos to edit, you can also put the different photos into a collage by just a selecting and clicking create collage. Also, if printing is too much a hassle for you, Picasa actually allows you to share your photos through email and web. You can easily post it up on a blog with just a click if you have a blog for the parents to check up for updates or just send it to their emails without having to worry about resizing it and uploading the pictures as Picasa helps you with it with just a click of a button.
A parent’s night coming up and you need to rush out a slideshow or movie of pictures? Well, making Slide shows has never been easier with Picasa. You can just create it using Picasa and save it into a CD straight! You can also put the children’s photo as a slideshow and give it as a gift to the parents! It’s that easy.
Also, Picasa helps to make your archiving of your photos easier into a CD or DVD. This way, you need not worry if your computer crashes and all the photos are gone. And it makes exporting of the photos you edited to any hard disk or hard drive easily. Picasa is just that easy and simple to use.
Web Tool 2: Getty Images
Getty images is a website where you can browse and search for photos, pictures and music files. They have just revamped their website and it is very well-done up. If one is a member of getty images, he can buy the original music files through getty images. As for non-members, one can only search for the music files they want and listen to the soundtracks online. The search engine for pictures and photos is very well-established. The main categories are creative, editorial, photo assignments and footages. The creative category mainly consists of rights-managed, right-ready and royalty-free images. The editorial images are spilt into three parts; news, sports and entertainment. The photo assignments provide links to other professional image websites and the footages provide a large scope of sub categories to obtain images from. If one wants to search images more specifically, he can also choose to use the advanced search or the catalyst search. The advanced search provides many categories and sub categories to select and search for the image you want. The catalyst search simply requires you to type a keyword to find your image and other related keywords will be suggested to aid in the image search. But of course, there will be the simple image search, where you can choose to search in the creative, editorial or footages category.
Getty images is useful to teachers to search for images. As teachers prepare lessons for their children, there may be times when they are not able to find the real-life object to show the children and thus a picture or photo of a real object will give the children an idea of the real object. The images are all finely taken and thus are clear and sharp. Cartoonised images can also be found. Teachers can use them as templates for children’s hands-on work or for use of beautifying the classroom. All three categories of the image search engine can be used as sources for teachers’ lessons, own general knowledge and for the pleasure and general knowledge of children too. Teachers can even use the images as materials for their various learning corners. For example, a number of images can be used to play memory game whereby the children try to flip open two identical images. The images can also be used to label materials so children know where to put their materials.
Conclusion: Picasa
Comparing both Getty Image and Picasa, we had come to a conclusion that Picasa is better for the educators although Getty Image useful as well. Picasa has more functions as compared to Getty Image. By using Picasa, we can edit the photos, add in captions even making slide shows to present to the parents. Whereas for Getty Image, it does not provide the above few functions. Picasa also helped to sort out those photographs easily. This will allow us to locate the photo straightforwardly and it will not take up much of our time as well. With all these functions that Getty Image does not have, Picasa is proven to be a better web tool for not only the teacher, but anyone.
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