Pictures have a direct route to long-term memory.
Turn any image into an online jigsaw puzzle. Put a photo of a student into a reading poster. Place your class on the cover of a magazine. Change a photograph into a cartoon drawing. Add picture frames and text to field trip photos. There are dozens of free online tools that let you do all of this and more!
Teachers use digital images as visual aids to make their lessons more memorable. They also use images on their class websites to enhance its look or to communicate a message.
Students use digital images in their projects. The image itself might be the end product or images might be used in slide shows, websites, videos, brochures, etc.
Here are some free websites teachers and students can use to make fun and educational images:
Resize Image
Very simple website where you can easily resize an image to fit on your website. Remember, it’s ok to make an image smaller, but enlarging a digital image will make it look blotchy.Speechable
Caption a photo with speech bubbles and text. Great for foreign language and for learning about historic figures.Official Seal Maker
Pick a seal and then enter the text you want on it.READ Image Generator
Create your own reading poster. Unfortunately, this site only produces a small image.Make Your Own Chocolate Bar
Input short text and this site generates a candy bar with that text. This could be a cute way to advertise your web address or or upcoming event on your website or in a newsletter.RedKid.Net
Put your own text on a variety of images, like a hotdog, iPod, sign, or even in a bowl of soup.Dynamic Einstein Picture
Enter your own text on Albert Einstein’s chalkboard.Wanted Poster
Make an Old-West style poster. Instead of using yourself, try making posters about animals, environmental threats, or famous people.The Newspaper Clipping Image Generator
Type in the name of the paper, date, headline, and story to generate a realistic-looking newspaper clipping. This is a fun way to post announcements on your website.Big Huge Labs Magazine
Design a cover of a magazine using your own photo as the background.BeFunky
Easily add photo effects, speech bubbles, text, and frames to your images. One of the best effects turns your photo into a cartoon drawing.Badge Maker
Make an ID badge or pass. Issue one to students when they demonstrate mastery of a skill. Sometimes second grade teachers issue their students a “subtraction license.”Motivator
Create your own customized motivational poster. Great for illustrating vocabulary words.Jigsaw Planet
Make any image into an interactive online jigsaw puzzle for students to solve. Using educational images will help students remember whatever is in that image. For example, students work on putting together a puzzle showing the three branches of government.Picnik
Tweak your photos with a variety of editing tools. Add text, clip art, and picture frames to photos.Blabberize
Make a talking photo! Upload an image, indicate the mouth, and then record audio.Gizmoz
Another site for making talking photos. This is more complicated than Blabberize.
It’s best if you can use your very own images at the sites above. However, there are times when you want to use photos you find on the Internet. Remember that images you find on the Web are copywritten and you must have permission to repost them on online. Luckily there are sources for copyright-friendly images. You can download and freely use images from sites like the ones below.
- Google Advanced Image Search
- Wikimedia Commons
- OpenPhoto
- Image * After
- Pics4Learning
- FreeFoto
- Flickr Creative Commons Search
As you can see, there are so many creative ways for images to be used in education. Got another site to share? How about specific ideas on using these tools in the classroom? Please leave a comment!
Tags: by Tony Vincent
I used the newspaper image generator to present information to my class today. It was handed out as the warm up activity instead of the normal one on the overhead. The students really liked seeing the information posted in a different format. This is away that I can bring reading into my math class. Thank you for the links. I would have probably not of found these if it was not for this post. I will also try some of the other links in up coming lessons.
Try FotoFlexer — it’s billed as the world’s most advanced online image editor. It supplies digital Botox and plastic surgery accompanied by the standard cropping, color and contrast adjustments, flipping, rotating, and red eye elimination features. Add text or stickers. Use the plethora of special effects to turn your photo into a blueprint, a work of art, a cartoon, an old photo, a sketch, a fresco, or use other special effects to enhance it.
#Digital Images with Tony V
Thanks for the fun! Tony’s presentations are always outstanding and fun.
Xtranormal is fun too (I am sure you have already found it. http://www.xtranormal.com/watch?e=20090119221751776 is an example of 3D “animation” that reminds me of something you may play with and discover many applications. I used it like an online diorama that captures the key parts of To Kill a Mockingbird in a dialog. I can imagine kids using it to explain math theorem to each other virtually. It is just easy.
- I am always eager for more ideas from you guys. Thanks again, Emily
Other awesome site that you reminded me of today:
http://tineye.com/
reverse image search
Awesome session on Tuesday! I just stumbled across another fun site: http://beta.mashface.com/
Upload a photo or use one of your own, record part of your face and overlay on the photo.
Good Morning,
I’m reviewing my notes from the GAETC conference and tried to click on the link above to StoryBlender. It is in Korean. Do you know how to change it to English or is this possibly the wrong url?
The StoryBlender site has been shut down and a new Korean site has been put in its place. I’ve removed the StoryBlender link. Blabberize is an alternative to StoryBlender (though the lips in StoryBlender were hilarious).