Have you noticed some similarities with YA covers lately? So has the 100 Scope Notes blog, which has instructions for you to create your own YA covers using Picnik, Flickr creative commons images, and your imagination.

Follow Scopes’ instructions to randomly generate an author’s name and a one-word title … then do a search on Flickrcc (hadn’t seen this interface for accessing Flickr Creative Commons images - it’s great!) to serve as your cover art.  Flickrcc will let you auto-import your image into Picnik for easy editing and addition of text.

Here’s mine:

My friend Ann suggested that you could get students to create faux covers (maybe a little less queasy-generating than this one?) and then create a bulletin board interspersing the faux with real book covers. 

I was able to use Picnik without creating an account, downloading the final product to my hard drive.

Other possible uses for Flickrcc + Picnik in school:

• Create book advertisement posters after reading a book
• Take self-portrait photos, edit them, and add short poetry texts
• Create a tourism postcard representing a setting from a story
• Create a poster showing the theme of a book
• Take a subject students are learning about (Revolutionary War) and make a movie preview poster for it (”Johnny Depp in the Midnight Ride of His Life”) - Ann
• Create posters to classify items scientific characteristics (magnetic or not? reptile or amphibian?) Find a photo that illustrates the concept and label it

This can also be a very quick, one-class project (our efforts  took no more than 10 minutes) for times when you want to use technology to motivate learning.

Have fun! If you create one, please let me know!

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Dear Microsoft,

The other day I realized that if you right click on a picture, and you have the client version of Outlook open, you can email a photo right from the Web to someone.  Cool stuff!

A colleague and I were collecting Flickr Creative Commons photos, and it made the process a lot easier …… until we got to the attribution part.  My colleague wanted to cite the URL for each photo (three cheers for her!), but the URL wasn’t automatically included in the emails I was sending to her.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the “email this picture” feature automatically put the URL of the photo right in the subject line or body of the email so that people could easily cite the photo?

We’re working hard at our school for students to understand the “why” of citation — that we want to acknowledge the work of others and how that work helped us. Could you help us make that process easier?

Thanks, Kristin

PS – The image above came from Flickr and was used with a Creative Commons attribution license.

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   I haven’t yet,but if you have, will you leave a comment? Picnik, which I heard about on a blog recently, appears to be a photo editor that’s completely online and that edits photos that have already been posted to Facebook, Picasa Web Albums, Photobucket, Webshots, Flickr, and more. I’m a pretty big Picasa fan, but perhaps this would help with on-the-fly edits? Something to think about during this holiday vacation!Image from Picnik home page�

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