Picasa Photo Album manager - why use it?
Nov 9
posted by Mark Christie in
Moodle, Picasa, Google
| 0 Comments
You may not use Picasa to manage your photos but here is why those in a teaching environment should consider it.
I will create a camtasia demo of what I have just written about for those of you (like me) who would prefer a movie to words... but for now just words...
Why choose Picasa?
- It is free - which means that you can allow students to install it with worrying about copyright issues
- It is very easy to use
- It doesn't damage or change your orginal photographs
- It provides you with the ability to upload them to a free location on the web - for public or private viewing
- You can link your photos to maps - all online
- It provides the ability to collaborate with users you share photographs with so they can upload photographs as well. Of course you can choose not to allow others to collaborate.
- Very easy to add tags, or keywords to one or more photographs.
Some challenges and solutions
How do we answer the potential problem of teachers being accused of socially fraternising with students in what are described as social networking places? Well just as it is sometimes unwise to be alone in a room with closed doors and a student, it is best to ensure that any interaction in a social networking room or private photo album setup for collaboration has the owner (a teacher) establish a collaboration link with another teacher or overseer at the outset who can drop in at any time to review the interactions within the album or room.
This provides a closed community within the Internet environment with always more than one adult assigned to that virtual space. Overkill? Maybe, however if it is treated as more an opportunity for teachers to actively collaborate and exchange knowledge through this system rather than a security focus, the net outcome will be a positive, safe and secure environment for teacher and student alike.
It permits easy tagging of photographs - great for grouping all photographs that have a cat in them. You can many tags to one photograph and it allows to have on hand a bunch of tags you use quite often. These could be your department, school, teaching discipline, course name, your name and a bunch of other common tags that you can add to one or many pictures.
When you add an album, Picasa can automatically identify photographs with faces in them. This is great for identifying photographs with faces in an album that you have uploaded from your camera. You can then add information about the person including talent release information like Talent Release number, limitations of photo use etc. This provides a quick consistent way to deal with people in photographs. Of course regrdless of what is written here, always consult policy and follow the guidleines in those policies when it comes to the publishing of anyone's image - be they student, staff or stranger.
Georeferencing - the ability to link a photograph to a product like Google Earth or Google Maps opens up great opportunity for cross school, cross town or cross world collaboration on school projects. for example a school in Darwin studying horticulture wants to compare growing conditions for Habaneros chillies in Mexico with growing conditions in Darwin. By having two classes in two countries collaborating on recording images of chillies, soils, vegetation and mapping them to their respective location in Google Earth, studetns can not only learn about horticulture, but gain a more global appreciation for the application of this knowledge with student colleagues across the world.
All of this done using Google Earth and Picasa, two free pieces of software from Google.
So... what is the catch? None that I can see as long as common sense is used. The original photographs are stored on the computer or corporate folder so they are not lost to the originating school. You only share what you decide to share. With some simple precautions the students and teachers operate in a virtual room where if required all interactions are viewable to a deisgnated overseer or monitor.
It frees up valuable disk space and where the images can be shared (of buildings, places, animals, vegetation etc) there is no impediment to anyone wanting to view the images to do so.
Which brings me to copyright. Within Picasa, tools exist to permit everything from total free use via download to just looking at the photograph. You can apply creative commons licensing to the works as well.
So, I have started with Picasa, but will end with YouTube. If we can collaborate with images and a map, we can do the same with videos. YouTube offers the same powerful tools for uploading, tagging and sharing videos with people. These videos can be embedded in blogs like this one or linked to maps like Google Maps or Google Earth.
A map is not always the right metaphor to share content and because of that the use of tools like Moodle which is an open source Learning Management System is one way of structuring content. The course creation tool can be used to structure a set of folders that contain links to video and photograph assets that are actually stored in Picasa.
You learn more about Picasa 3.5 features from http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93773
We will establish a resource repository in Moodle and I am keen to see how you would like to group items considering that Picasa Albums are generally "owned" by an individual who may decide to embed an album from their account or just a photograph from an album. Not everyone who contributes will be able to edit category information in Moodle, but if they know what categories or groupings we are using, they can align their albums accordingly.
