A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

Have you ever taken a photo that needs to be cropped, re-sized, or brightened up a bit? Do red-eyes make you see red? There's a great photo editing program already installed on any computer with Microsoft Office . Here's the catch. If you don't already know about this program, your photos are probably opening in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer which is great for viewing or rotating images but not much else.

It's really easy to change the default image editing program so that your photos always open up in Microsoft Office 2010 (also known as Microsoft Office Picture Manager if you are still using Office 2003 at home).

1. Right-click on any image you have already saved to your computer or an external drive.
2. Choose 'open with'.
3. Drop down to the 'choose program' at the bottom of the list.
4. Choose Microsoft Office 2010 (or Microsoft Office Picture Manager)
5. Make sure the box next to "always use the selected program to open this type of file" is checked.
6. Click OK

You will now be able to crop, rotate, re-size, adjust brightness and contrast, remove red eyes and much more. Click here for an introduction to Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Website of the Week

Bitly.com

Bitly isn't just another URL shortener. Not only can you shorten and share your links, but with Bitly, you can customize the links and track them as well. And as a bonus, Bitly lets you bundle several sites together. Here's my bundle of 16 online photo editors *, just in case you want to be more creative than Microsoft Office Picture Manager allows. Try Bitly today. Signup is free and quick.
*Even though none of these 16 sites are blocked in the district, teachers should evaluate them before recommending to students.

Tip of the Week

Keyboard shortcuts can save you time and frustration. Here are a few for ActivInspire:

Ctrl + U will bring up the Edit Profiles window where you can quickly add tools to you main tool bar.

Ctrl + B will open and close the browsers.

F11 will bring up the dashboard.

Look for other keyboard shortcuts for almost any program by clicking on the file menu, and hovering over the other menus. When a shortcut is available, it will be listed to the right of an option.

Super Searches

Have you ever wanted your students to use something other than Google or Wikipedia for research (assuming they have already consulted our library databases)? Here are a few clever and fun specialty search engines to check out. As with all recommended resources, please look at these sites first to determine their appropriateness for your students.

 

QuinturaKids is a fun, visual, and intuitive search engine that allows kids to refine their search by clicking on words in a tag cloud. As a bonus, Quintura also has an iPad and iPhone app available.

Yippy is a simple search engine that categorizes the search results on the left of the search result window. The search can then be narrowed by clicking on any one of the topics.

Twurdy provides a readability rating for each of the web site results it returns for any search. This is especially helpful for students who often find themselves accessing information on web sites that is much too difficult for their age and/or reading ability.

Sort-Fix is a search engine that narrows the millions of results that might otherwise be returned. Students can drag and drop power words they want to add to or exclude from their search.

Tip of the Week

Get more from Google by taking advantage of its advanced search feature.  Do you want only sites with easy readability or only sites that contain images? You can even see your results categorized in a concept map. Click on Advanced Search at the end of the search field.  Enter the topic you are searching for. Next to "Reading Level", choose basic (easy), intermediate (a bit harder), or advanced (the most difficult). Now, click the Advanced Search button in the lower right hand corner.  You can easily modify the reading level on the search results page. The Wonder Wheel (concept map), Timeline, and more can be found under "All Results" on the left.

Web Resource - Picnik

Picnik is a great photo editing site.  It has many of the photo fixing tools that you might need - crop, rotate, resize, sharpen, exposure, red-eye fix, and more. PLUS, there are loads of text options, effects, and stickers to add to your pictures.