This week's photo tools and Creative Commons posting

For our assignment this week, I went on a Creative Commons dive for an awesome library-related picture. What a find--now THAT'S a library! My husband and I will have been married 20 years in September. For our honeymoon we toured Ireland, and I will never forget the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin. Home to the Book of Kells and many other rare books, it is an incredibly beautiful building. It is certainly not a modern learning commons though! I would love to return there now with a librarian's eye. Can you imagine performing a collections analysis...on a ladder? This library is really more of a museum. You can be sure the students of Trinity College have a full, modern library to use.

Hugovk. (2013). Old Library, Trinity College. CC-BY-NC-SA.

Our assignment was also to edit a photo in one of the many photo editing tools available online. I took this one recently, on one of those beautiful May days that almost force you to sit outside. I edited it in PicMonkey, adding a Focal Zoom as well as text to the bottom of the photo. This was an easy-to-use site and it must be a good one, because I know my kids use it and they know EVERYTHING. (Just ask them!)

The site is elegantly designed and very thoughtful of its audience, whether inexperienced or not. Everything is very well explained, with pop-up dialogue boxes to make things easier. The photo came out great, and I bet all teachers out there can relate to this one. I was in an elementary school today--it's Friday during SOL testing week and it's really hot outside. The kids are squirrelly and so is the teaching staff!

Nelson, W. (2015). If you need me... CC-BY-NC

I also played with ImageChef, which is a site similar to one I've used before to make memes. (I have a whole collection of memes of "advice from my mother," which you can see on my Pinterest site.) You can use a standard meme photo or one of your own and add text. But that is just one of the many types of templates on Image Chef. There are seemingly endless photo frames, animations (.gifs), text editors, buttons, and lots of "remixes" created by users. This site would be fun for students to use to enhance their presentations or for digital scrapbooking. The only caveat I can see is that it is difficult to focus on one type of frame or theme, because the site is disorganized and full of ads. But for those who like to play, ImageChef offers up plenty of interactive freedom. 

In terms of design and ease-of-use, BigHugeLabs seems to have an edge up on ImageChef. The site is a lot less ugly and seems to be better organized, and you can turn off the ads. The variety of options is extensive--there are 24 top-level categories with many internal editing possibilities. One pro: education accounts are possible. A con: BigHugeLabs is sales-driven and may entice students to want to purchase what they create in school. But overall, I'd point students to this site over ImageChef.

FoldPlay is one type of site I have never seen or used before. This one has me excited! First, in one of the school libraries I inhabit the most, origami is huge. This site allows you to create foldables from your own pictures, including origami, fold books, paper models and puzzles, and much more. What a fun thing for students to play with in a library makerspace. I want to try this right away.