Aviary – Free Graphic Tools

In my constant quest for finding quality tools for free, I’ve come across Aviary – a collection of image tools, all beautifully designed and easy to use. The cornerstone of the collection is Phoenix a desktop image editor, perfect for those quick photo-editing tasks like cropping, rotating and touch-ups. Because it’s web-based, it’s always to hand and it loads really quickly. It also supports layers which is fantastic if you’re combining images.

Also in the collection is Toucan, a colour editor. This allows you to explore how colours are related and look together. Great if you’re looking at colour wheels and colour theory as part of an art project.

Other tools include Peacock, an effects editor (tricky to get the hang of to begin with, but great fun once you get going); Raven, a vector editing tool (comprehensive and easy to use). Finally there’s Falcon which allows you to mark up images and make easy screen captures.

Falcon is the application I use the most. If you’re using Firefox as your browser, I strongly suggest you install the Falcon plug-in (Talon) since it give you the power of this handy tool while you’re browsing the web. It’s great for making, cropping and saving screen captures. Yes, it has replaced Cropper as my preferred method for doing this!

Finally, a very handy trick is provided by Aviary. If you’re wanting to capture part of a webpage just type Aviary.com/ in front of the web address (URL) in your browser’s address bar. Try it!

Finally, why the bird theme? Apparently, it’s creation on the fly…!

More on Visualisers

Avermedia Visualiser

I have been having more and more conversations with schools about visualisers, especially following a training session where we have used one. In particular there is a great deal of interest in using them as a tool to help teachers with Assessment for Learning(AFL). Teachers really like the ability to take a child’s book and share the work within it easily with the class. Visualisers allow for immediate access without the need for scanning or photographing work. Using the supplied software, teachers (or of course children) can capture the image and share this electronically or annotate it in IWB software. Some companies’ software included annotation tools making this process seamless. Please click here for my previous post.

Pricing is always a factor for schools when equipping classrooms with new kit. In my opinion, a visualiser is only going to be used if the teacher has constant access to it since this will allow for ‘on the hoof’/spontaneous use, responding to the flow of lessons and children’s needs. A shared visualiser between several classes wouldn’t really allow for this. Prices currently range from around £350 upwards depending on the resolution of the image and the features included. If you are using one and would like the chance to win another one, just send Avermedia a copy of a lesson plan illustrating the way you have used a visualiser in your classroom. Click here for details.

If you are interested in looking at visualiers and other audio visual equipment Presentation Media  and HDi (based in Avonmouth) are holding an open day where teachers and IT subject leaders can meet various company representatives to discuss their requirements. If you couldn’t get to BETT this year, this might be a good opportunity. See their Open Day flyer.

BBC Class Clips

Some of you may recall the Creative Archive Licence that was launched a few years ago. The idea behind it was that some of the archives of some of our quality broadcasters would be made available for use in education and creative projects.

From the BBC’s side of things, it all went quiet about two years ago. However, I stumbled across a new service that is located in the BBC’s Schools section – Class Clips.

This is a superb collection of over 2000 educational videos that aren’t only bits of stock footage, but extracts of educational programming  that can be used in a wide range of contexts. The searching is clean and simple and watching the clips is easy. You can view them via the web page or copy and paste various URLs so that you can hyperlink directly to just the video (see Video Options at the bottom of the right hand menu).

(And for those of you that read my last post, yes, the above image was created in three clicks!)

Cropper

Every now and again you come across some little useful gadget that is a pleasure to use and makes your life so much easier. It is probably a sad reflection of my life that this little gadget has caused me so much delight recently.

Cropper is a screen capture tool. It allows you to drag its resizable rectangle over your screen and with a simple double clip put a jpeg image of the area into a folder on your system (or a bmp, or png…etc!). It even shows you the size of the capture in pixels – useful when you need to get something to fit certain dimentions.

It’s a joy to use and once loaded, it sits in your system tray. Click on it to activate, double click the rectangle to capture and save the image. Screen captures in three clicks. Does life get any better than this?! Click here to get it!

Busbi Camera

To some Busby was the Post Office’s predecessor to BT’s Beattie, but here I’m talking about Busbi a new(ish) addition to the handheld video camera market.

I have to thank Louise at Swainswick for drawing my attention to this. I was raving about the Flip Camera, when she showed me this, which is less than half the price of a Flip – around £30 rather than £80. It can be purchased from Amazon as well as Argos.

From the reviews, it does seem you get what you pay for. Some say the quality is about as good as a webcam (about 320×240 for QVGA) but for a point and shoot video camera that’s easy to operate, has a good recording time and crucially will allow schools to afford several of them at once, I think it’s certainly worth looking at. Here’s a review from PC Advisor, plus there are customer reviews on the Amazon site. I would be interested to hear what people think of them. Louise is certainly pleased with hers!

Globe Hopping – Time Travelling

 Surfing the net can be a very time consuming business. One link leads to another and another where you spot something that you just have to click on. We’ve all been there. And before we know it, life’s passed you by!

Well, tonight’s clicking has lead to something that has definitely got that “WOW!” factor that more than makes up for previous fruitless clicking. After stumbling across Google’s channel on You Tube, I spotted this video. WARNING: after watching you will want to download!!

To take your time travelling trip to Ancient Rome, you’ll need to have the latest version of Google Earth installed (version 4.3)  Once installed, you can activate the layer by clicking on “Ancient Rome 3D” which is located within the “Gallery” folder in the left hand panel of the Google Earth interface.

Once you’ve clicked on the Ancient Rome layer, you’ll need to fly to Rome (you probably could have worked that bit out!).

Once there, zoom in to just above street level and then you’ll see lots of yellow buildings begin to load. Click on any of them to bring up information about that building.

Near the bottom of the information box that then appears there are three download links. One is for a terrain layer. Download this one first, which masks the present day Rome, and then choose from the second and third download link how many buildings you want to see.

Be warned. You will need a fast internet connection AND a fast processor on your computer. It can take a while for the downloads to start happening and even longer for the buildings to be rendered on your machine. They recommend a system minimum of Dual-Core 2.0GHz CPU + 3 GB RAM + High End GPU with 512 MB RAM, in case you were wondering. To get the best from your Roman tour, Google also recommends you turn off the “3D Buildings” layer, after which should should be able to glide gracefully around the city.

Nevertheless, this is an amazing project. Not only is it very clever, intuative and brings the past to life (well, almost), it is exciting in the way it is using different sources of data to create something new.