Using Picasa in Your Classroom to Publish Student Work

Sometimes, we as teachers get too swept up in the planning, teaching and assessing at school, and not enough on the display or showcasing of student work. With the advent of technology in recent years, more and more teachers are taking photos or video recording their students at work. Teachers and students have the opportunity now to publish those photos on their school maintained websites, blogs or showcasing it on their favorite social networking site.

A great free tool that I have been working with that will allow you to edit, share, organize and publish your photos is Google's Picasa. What I really like about Picasa is the ability to automatically update your photos and then share them in a variety of ways with just one click of a button. Due to the fact that Picasa is a Google tool, it can easily interact with other Google tools such as Blogger, Google Earth, You Tube, Picnik and Web Albums so that you can post images in the forms of playable slideshows, movies or collages.

Besides showcasing your student work, students could use this program as a form of digital storytelling by grabbing several photos and adding music they can make a You Tube video. They could take photos in a sequence for an experiment, such as documentation on a Science lab project. My students really enjoyed editing the photos with Picasa's "sister" program of Picnik, which seems to work hand-in-hand with one another. The students really enjoyed the various features and special effects that the online photo editing site offered, as they were able to create brand new pieces of art from boring old photographs from our field trip or the net book's webcam. Also, several of the students were already accustomed to Picnik, as they bragged about the photos they had previously upload and posted on their Facebook pages.

Picasa also has some great publishing tools that make sharing your photos a breeze. By using Picasa's Web Albums, I can automatically sync folders on my computer so that the whole album can be viewable online. If there are any changes made on your computer's file or the folder, the web album will be synced to the change. Once your album is online, you can post them in your Blogger account or you can share an embeddable slideshow. You can also use the Geo-Tag feature on your album, so that you can post on Google Maps or Google Earth where your photos were taken. Your album can also easily tell you what people are found in an album by your Gmail contacts (or import your other email contacts) and by tagging your friends and family with its facial recognition tool.

If you would like to experiment more with this program, or to see how you can create movies of your students work and post them on your site, you can view my Blog, which has some video tutorials on utilizing Picasa. I would heavily encourage teachers to utilize this free tool, and just about any other Google tool that you can get your hands on. So if you like to take pictures of your students and want to share, edit and publish them on the internet, then I would recommend that you go the Picasa site and download it now.