Weekly Post - Picasa

What?
This week we had to explore Picasa - a picture editing program - on our own. We didn't really have an assignment to go with it because the teacher was out sick and we were just supposed to mess around with it.

So What?
Picasa, like other Google programs, is a great way to share documents over the internet. This will make it easier for me as a student when I work on group projects that involve pictures. I have found that it is really hard to share pictures if you have a lot of pictures that are big file sizes. By uploading them and inviting people to view your web album, they can just copy the pictures they want to their computer whenever they want.

Because I am in the practicum class, I have been taking a lot of pictures that need to be shared with the other teachers. By uploading the web album to Picasa I can share all of these pictures without having to burn them to CDs or copy them to flashdrives. This will make it easier on me and all of the other student teachers. If we share pictures through Picasa everyone can get the pictures they need a whole lot faster and more efficiently.

Now What?
Picasa wil be a great tool for me as a preschool teacher. I'm sure I will take so many pictures and they can't all fit onto a newsletter. By creating a web album and inviting the students parents to view they can see pictures of what we do in class and copy pictures of their own kids to have for their own. This saves from printing pictures which can get expensive when you take so many.

I could also create a "Show and Teach" album, for the pictures that the kids take at home to share with the class. By doing this, the kids could have their parents go to the web album and then the kids could tell the parents about the "Show and Teach" pictures and teach their parents the things they learned in class. This would be a great way to develop language skills at home.

Video
I liked this video. It was funny because it is so true. I think people tend to get carried away when making PowerPoint presentations because of all the exciting things you can do. Less is more when it comes to PowerPoints. I don't mean that you should make 4 slides with a white background and 12 pt. times new roman font, I just mean that it's too overwhelming to choose a theme for each slide and a different crazy font. Make it interesting, but keep it simple.