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This week I bring you a stack of sites that can quickly add some fun and zest to your photos, great for dressing up websites, blogs, and even the walls of your classroom.
 The first one is Block Posters. Simply upload a photo to the site and set how many pages you want it enlarged to. The tool will "slice" up your photo into sections on A4 or Letter (US) sized paper, either in landscape or portrait mode. For instance, I was able to take a photo and make it 10 pages wide (which would fill a large part of my classroom wall). When finished, the file is ready to download in PDF format. Each page has a white border around it for safety because many printers will not print to the exact edge of a page. Simply cut this off, or leave it on for a "mosaic" look. Uploads are limited to 1 MB in size, so "blowing them up" too large will create pixellation (where the image starts to get "blocky"). Some great uses for classrooms would be: put your class photo on a wall; make your own posters about units of study from photos that students took themselves; create posters of individual students to celebrate their birthday; enlarge student artwork before hanging them in the hall.
Another fun site is Big Huge Labs. There's plenty to do here with photos and the site can easily import your collections from your Flickr account. Some of my favorites are Movie Poster (make faux movie posters from photos or artwork, complete with Movie Ratings and Release Dates), Trading Card (turn photos into authentic looking "magic" or gaming cards), Motivational Poster (great for classroom rules, skills or goals), Framer (which allows you to give your photos a classy frame or turn them into stamps, to-do lists, or "film"), and Badge Maker (suitable for name tags or IDs). These examples are just a few of the many offerings. All creations are free and give you photos suitable for web use, but you can also buy a premium account which will let you download high-res images.
Photo Notes is also a great site. It does one thing only, but it does it well: turns your photo into a Polaroid photo with the ability to add text. Text can be designed with different fonts or color and there are six different Polaroid images to choose from so your blog/website will have some variety if this is a tool you use often.
PictArtia will take your photo and remap it as a Mosaic (made up of hundreds of smaller photos). You can decide on how many photos will be used to make the Mosaic and the category of photos to be used, such as Beach, Flowers, Butterflies, Food, Cities. All photos are pulled from Flickr collections. It would be nice if you could pull photos from your own photo collections on Flickr, but that's not possible at this time.
ImageChef is similar to Big Huge Labs, allowing you to create artificial images, but focusing this time on adding text to already established images. There are 100s of templates to choose from and it's a quick way to spice up a blog entry. Some of my favorites include: Newspaper Headline (where you could enter the title of your blog entry), Buttons (perfect for sidebars on a blog site), and License Plates (which allow you to create mini Vanity plates, perfect for your class' name or room number).
Most of the sites mentioned above are supported by advertising and also are geared towards the MySpace crowd, so teachers of younger grades should assess them before using them with students.
 Bob Sprankle
has been a multi-age teacher in Wells, ME for 10 years and has served
as the school's Technology Integrator for the past two years.
POSTED ON HOTCHALK.COM
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