With Pixlr, Who Needs Photoshop?

Pixlr is an online photo editor with a vast potential.  Certainly not for those with printing needs, but for those designing for the web Pixlr may become a better option than Photoshop.  Pixlr is not only free, but also web-based (no need to install anything on your computer nor to keep up with updates), and you do not even need to create an account to work with it.  In addition, there is a bonus, an extension you can install on your browser called Pixlr Grabber.

Many web-based photo editors require you to register.  With Pixlr, you can start editing your images with a browser and an internet connection.

Pixlr has three applications, Pixlr Editor, Express and Grabber.  Editor is almost like Photoshop, Express is to perform quick edits, and Grabber is a very handy extension you install in your browser to have ready acces to online images.  With Grabber, you have three capturing options, entire page, a selection, or the visible area of a page.

Pixlr Editor looks  very similar to Photoshop and has almost all the same basic functions and toolbar.  Pixlr also has Layers, History, and Navigation windows.  The text tool is also very powerful with a considerable library of fonts.

To start working, you can open an image from your computer or directly from a URL (you can also create a new image from scratch).  When you finished editing, you can save the result to your computer just as if you were working with Photoshop or any other application installed on your computer.

So, if you create web content, you should certainly give Pixlr a try.  You do not need to open an extra application, just open a new tab, type pixlr.com and start working.

Other web-based photos editors reviewed here http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10170333-2.html

 

Know-how and Content Worth

“I can’t publish!”
Once I teach my students about online tools and they are all ready to go, many of them tell me that they can’t publish. They feel what they have to say does not merit publishing because nobody would be interested in reading it.
This is when I realized that teaching online publishing and marketing tools was not only about having my students learn the know-how, but that it was more complex than that.
Once my students overcome all technical difficulties and are finally ready to press de WordPress’ blue button labeled “Publish,” many of them, believe the content of their publication will be of no interest to anyone.
I finally realize that teaching the need of a tools does not only involve teaching students how this tool can help them, but also making them understand that what they have to say matters.
This is yet, a third step that I need to accomplish in order to make my students successfully use online tools for publication and marketing.

Create It Live

Click Here

Discussing the Importance of the Tool Before Teaching the Tool Itself

How will WordPress help my career?  This is the question I many times encounter when telling

Top Ten Tools

my students they should create a website or a WordPress. com site.  If I ask them to create a WordPress.com website as a homework assignment, some of them even tell me that they will not do their homework because they do not want to have a website.

These responses taught me that I was taking much for granted.

What I have learned is that I should make sure I thoroughly introduce the tool first and only once my students have a proper understanding of the usefulness of a given tool, I should go to the hands-on assignment.

For instance, if you want your students to make a podcast, you should first make sure they understand what the practical use of podcasts is.  If they study marketing, communication, or business, then you should talk about the importance of podcasts as a marketing tool.  If they study journalism, you should make sure your students understand how through podcasts, they could showcase they work and actually start a journalistic career there and then through the publication of audio programs, commentaries, interviews, etc.

A good video tutorial explaining the use of some basic and free online tools including article-marketing, forum-marketing, and video-marketing is “Where Can You Advertise Your Business For Free on the Internet-The Top 3 Ways” by Jared Wiener.  A “Case Study: Blogging Works Even For A Gunsmith” is a video discussing the importance of WordPress as a marketing tool by Bill Seaver of MicroExplosion Media.

To sum up, make sure your students understand how a tool can help them accomplish what they want to accomplish or what the exact practical potential of that tool is.  Only once your students thoroughly understand this, you should introduce them to the tool itself.

Why WordPress.com

Wordpress.com

My experience with CMS dates from the Mambo era, starting in the year 2000.  I used to be a Mambo/Joomla fan who ended up switching to WordPress in 2005.

 

WordPress.com offers the best option for my project because it is not only free but also advertisement-free.  Therefore, all my students should have access to a site and domain of their own at no cost.

There is much written about the advantages of WordPress and WordPress.com.  I would only like to emphasize here what probably most people are saying about this free and high quality service.

Besides the fact that it WordPress.com is free and advertisement free, I strongly recommend to use WordPress.com in the ETA because of the following reasons:

• Very quick start.  It usually takes my students between one to two minutes to create a site (without content, certainly)
• Very intuitive so that students can create a site with three to five pages in thirty minutes to one hour without guidance.
• Functional and without a need to be maintained (as opposed to having a WordPress.org site you could host yourself or pay to have hosted)
• Excellent for SEO; i.e. to be found in Google and the-like searches
• Multimedia ready.  WordPress.com sites are all set to display content from Youtube, Dailymotion, etc. for videos.  For audio files or podcasts, BlipTV is a reliable free option, and is WordPress.com-ready.
• I find WordPress.com so appropriate for the task that I could not say anything negative about it except for a very little detail–I wish the mShots sites previews in this blog were disabled by default (just in case, if you want to turn it off but do not know how, go to Appearence/Extras)