Posted by on Sep 12, 2021 in LIBS602 | 5 comments

I experimented with all of the free editing sites suggested in the sandbox, and I settled on using Big Huge Labs primarily because this turned into a bit of a family project with my eight year old, and he was fascinated by this site. This is such a great resource for educators–it is so easy to use and very engaging. I think it’s an excellent (and safe!) way to teach students to be creators as well as consumers of different forms of literature. A project I often assign is to have my students turn books that we’ve studied into children’s books, or I assign them a tone/mood, and they have to rewrite a children’s book or create a poster in the assigned tone/mood. This would be perfect for my high school students to complete this assignment using media. Foldplay would also be great for this. 

I liked Tuxpi, which is also user friendly, and I used it to create a derivative of my photo selection. Tuxpi, like Big Huge Labs, seems great for younger users. 

Pizap and Pixlr are also very user friendly, and I spent some time playing around with them, too. I wasn’t happy with my editing on those because I over-edited on these sites just to get some experience using all the options.  

I am not an advanced user of technology, but I am not intimidated by it. However, it’s overwhelming to try to find these resources independently.  While teaching virtually, I would lose hours just searching for useful tools, and sometimes, this resulted in me just falling back on the same tired, familiar technology because I lost so much time searching! These sites are excellent resources, and I’m grateful to add them to my toolkit.