Ok, I must stop now. This is really addictive. There are literary hundreds of tools on the internet that can be used to customize pictures, texts, videos and, I am sure, music and other stuff. This is addictive because is a game. Unfortunately, as any game, it is mostly a waste of time. But it was fun! Hopefully I will stay away from it as I do with my favorite game – The Sims!I went to so many “places” that I don’t remember most of them now! Let me see… I decided to make the Header on this blog with http://www.spiffytext.com/.
I selected a cool background and some cool font but when I uploaded it onto my Header I noticed two things. First, the banner would not stretch all the way across the page (it was not wide enough). Second, the picture had their internet address embedded into it on two opposite corners. I decided to fix this. To make sure I am not ignoring any copyright rule I want to make this clear: I made the banner shown on this page with spiffytext.com. Please visit this website to make your own banner!
Then, thinking that perhaps I will have to get rid of this banner anyway, I decided to make my own. You can scroll down to the End of this page to see it.
I continued to play for a few hours making useless creations. Someone said that art is supposed to be useless so I don’t feel too bad about it. Looking at different text generators I found one that I thought would be interesting: Confucius Says Generator. I thought this tool shows Confucius quotes randomly, but it is just a caricature of Confucius with a text on top which can be customized:
I continued to play for a few hours making useless creations. Someone said that art is supposed to be useless so I don’t feel too bad about it. Looking at different text generators I found one that I thought would be interesting: Confucius Says Generator. I thought this tool shows Confucius quotes randomly, but it is just a caricature of Confucius with a text on top which can be customized:
I thought the coolest think was to make a caricature from your actual picture. Don’t go to www.Zwinky.com. This website says that you can create a cartoon of yourself for free but when you click on “Let’s go”, it just closes the tab on your browser and who knows what else it does.
I was determined to make a cartoon of my picture so I continued to try different sites. I found a promising one: http://www.cartoonme.com/. I entered a fake email address (baba@hotmail.com) and uploaded a picture of Eintein and this is what I got:
I couldn’t find anything for free so I gave up.
By far, the best picture effect that I found was how to make a 360 degrees panoramic picture with a normal camera. You must take several overlapping pictures turning around less than 90 degrees every time until you turn all the way around.
Then you load all the pictures with a freeware (http://www.photo-freeware.net/autostitch.php) and wait a couple of minutes. The composite picture is saved in the same folder where the rest of the pictures were with the name pano.jpg
After you make the panorama picture, open it and zoom in to see the height of the pano-picture as wide as the height of your computer monitor and then begin sliding the button slider of your picture viewer to have the same feeling as if you ware turning slowly around and looking around yourself 360 degrees. Here is My Barrio: (Click the picture for better resolution)
For step by step instructions on how to make this panorama picture go to this internet site:http://eventhorizons.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/make-your-own-360-degree-panoramic-picture
I’ve been thinking about how to use these tools in my classroom. I teach mathematics in a high school so I don’t see much use for Them in my classroom. I can see how teachers in elementary and middle school, and even teachers of other subjects, can use these tools. Art teachers could use all of them. Obviously, as a way to enhance the classroom website, these “image effect generators” and “Text generators” are very handy. But I cannot think of anything else for mathematics. Perhaps math teachers could use them when they are making a new PowerPoint presentation to animate some math explanations or to create some drawings related to the lesson at hand. I personally do this with MS Paint. I never do anything complicated enough to require a better image editor such as Adobe Photoshop.
A free program which claims to be “just like Photoshop but free” is GIMP. I haven’t used it but on a first look it doesn’t seem to be able to do “panoramic stitching”
In conclusion, free image, text, video and sound editors are a lot of fun and very handy to create attractive documents such as web pages, PowerPoint presentations, papers, custom books etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment