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Welcome to EdTech Tuesday, I'm Jennifer Gibson. And I'm Rich Dixon. Today we have an app called
PicCollage, and I'm dying to know what you're going to tell us about it. One of the great
things about it is it's free. Free is good, we like that. At the time of this recording,
we're looking at version 4.5.18. Things might change by the time you watch this, but this
is what it looks like now. When you launch PicCollage, you have an opportunity to start
adding pictures, text, and be able to tell a story or capture in the classroom. It's
already starting to look a little familiar to me. I've used some other apps like this
for Instagram and Facebook and whatnot. I think I know where you're going. Let's take
a look. To create a new collage, what we can do is we get a blank canvas, and we can tap
anywhere to add a photo. From here, we can add stickers, which are just small little
icons that come with this program. We can add text. We can grab photos from the web.
Let's say we're studying Ancient Rome, and I type in "Rome." So this does have an app
to the web? It sure does. That's a cautionary thing. Big time cautionary thing. You want
to make sure, too, that you remember that technically there's no filter on this, so
you want to be smart. Using your school's internet and you have this hooked up to the
wi-fi in your classroom, then you have at least the filters of the wi-fi there. That's
right, absolutely. I'm going to scroll through and find just a couple of different images
that we could quickly use to create a collage here. What we can do at this point is we can
move these little photos around and we can tap one and bring one in front of the other.
At this point, we have the opportunity to add some more information. We can add our
own photo, for example, we can take a picture with camera. So if we were just talking about
Rome and we had a project or something else... A diorama. Exactly, we could take a photo
and show that. We can also add text. I'm going to select that. Oh, this is wonderful. You
can see there's a lot of different types of fonts here. I can see this being a great opportunity
for students to have a visual representation of their project or research that they're
doing is one point on this. The other part, Rich, I just want to point out is, being in
the business world, this is what designers have to do all the time. So, there's that
rigor and relevance to jobs and what people do in the real world, so I like that idea.
I think there's a lot of neat application within here, and we can keep diving in more
and more to some of the details here, but there's a couple things I want to point out.
First of all, sharing: what we can do with this once we're done. We're going to tap that,
it's going to take a second to load up. And then there's a couple different things we
can do: we can actually post this to their website, and I'm going to show you and point
out... Or a blog, if they're doing a blog on their research. We can save it to our photo
library, which is really great; we can send it by email. Do note that Facebook, Twitter,
and Tumblr are all going to be options potentially for people to send things off to, but not
necessarily interact with. I'm going to now go back and tap over here. We can change the
layout or even the background, depending on what we want. So we have some templates. If
I wanted to do that, I can go ahead and play around. Look how professional: that should
be a magazine cover. I'm going to save this. What about printing? I just want to know a
little bit about that. Great questions. Let's go inside of here, and when we go to the share
icon here, there's not an opportunity to print, so the work-around would be to send this to
your photo library, and then inside of the photo library, open it up, hit the share bar,
and then print using AirPrint. I can see this as a great cover to something that they're
doing in print. Again, now that we're moving into more and more digital capabilities, the
blog or the student website, this is a great option, too. There's additional templates
that are available. They still have their holiday themes showing up at this point. What
about in-app purchases? In-app purchases: let's take a look here. There's not any that
I have come across yet, in terms of in-app purchases, as well. Ah, we have that. I do
want to point this out, though: so, for example, we have somebody who's spoofing as Katy Perry,
or maybe it's Katy Perry herself - I don't want to say spoofing - we can follow that
person, and we can invite others, we can connect on Facebook and share what we have with out
Facebook account. We want to be pretty heads-up on that. With universal access, Rich, do you
think there's a possibility to block that? I'm not sure that there is. There may be if
- unfortunately if you were to do that, we would be blocking out an entire swath or section
of the screen that then would not be available, say, when we're back at the blank board when
we're moving around with the canvas. Something else to highlight is I click on "interesting,"
so I now see a bunch of different - it's almost a little bit like Pinterest. You see some
different examples in here. I don't see anything inappropriate, but you don't know. You do
want to have someone watching this for younger students and for older students, just some
ground rules. I think it would be a great way to start to have that 21st-century-skill
discussion around appropriate use of technology and online resources. We can also see here,
one last thing I want to point out, which is Find Friends. We can certainly do that,
as well, but again it begs the question of appropriate use of technology. You want to
make sure, of course, that anything that we show you, not only in this episode or others,
is consistent with your acceptable use policy and technology plan for your district or school.
That's just a quick overview: what I love about it is it's very simple to use and to
create collages, as we saw earlier, very easy to manipulate, and something worth checking
out. And it's free.