Say Cheese!!

       I have found the most amazing website, Big Huge Labs. This website allows you to create all sorts of awesome projects from your pictures, including puzzles, calendars, mozaics, magazine covers and many other interesting items. I think that you could use this website to create many really neat projects for a classroom but the one that I chose to play around with was the "Captioner", which allows you to add captions (speech bubbles, thought bubbles or actions) to your pictures. This website was so easy to use; you don't even have to download pictures! All I had to do was link to either my Flickr account or Facebook (I used Flickr for this assignment) and you could upload a picture you already had on one of those two accounts. I chose a picture from my father's 60th surprise birthday party and it took seconds to be "selected" on the page. Then, you can create captions for your picture to add thoughts/words/actions and spice up the image a little bit. You could also choose to add a "stamp collection" at the bottom, meaning you could choose a theme like "party" and add certain party themed pictures to your image: party hats, confetti, streamers, etc. I had a lot of fun creating this image and the website was really user friendly!

        Although I created this image for fun, I think this tool could also be useful in an ELA classroom. I was thinking that students could use this Captioner tool to add comic-book like captions to illustrations, graphics or photos in stories that they have created to make them seem more professional. You could also have students make a scrapbook or an "All About Me" book in the first couple weeks of school as a "getting to know you" activity. The students could use this tool to add funny comments or thoughts to their scrapbooks to show a little bit more of their personality and lifestyle. Another idea I had for using this tool correlates with Noden's "Image Grammar." This is a way to teach grammar and to help students improve their writing by using images. Students could use this tool and do the grammar exercises right on the page when given one photo. Then, the students could compare their different responses and you could see how vastly different everyone's interpretations can be! Either way, I think this tool could be really useful and I think that the students would have a lot of fun playing with it and making the pictures their own!

Some rights reserved by W J (Bill) Harrison
Flickr Address