Aviary!!

Aviary is a whole suite of media editing tools - online and free. I have a new computer at home with Vista on it, and I was thinking I would need to buy PhotoShop Elements or something like that to edit my photos, but I got a free invite to the beta of a.viary.com and it's great! It's not PhotoShop, but I don't need anywhere near that level of complexity. I just want to resize, rotate, crop, adjust brightness, etc., and a.viary did everything pretty easily. Go there and sign up for an invite. They will send you three so you can spread them around. Be sure to look at some of their examples.

Flickriver

Saw this on Twitter also, a site that searches Flickr and serves up the photos in a seemingly endless stream. I searched for the tag "eggplant," probably because I had some really delicious Thai eggplant the other night, and got a stream of photos that included the color eggplant and many plates of eggplant cooked various ways along with the vegetable itself, but what I nice way to find images. Here is my eggplant stream. I also tried egret, ballons, and henna. What would you look for, or what would your students want to see?

You can save your search results as a link, which could be handy. Let's say you're teaching about Presidents Day. You could get a stream of Lincoln photos and show them while you are introducing some information or an activity.

And just for fun, check out FlickrVision. Like TwitterVision, it shows you on a map of the world where photos are being uploaded, with a thumbnail of the photo that you can click on the make it larger. This is I guess a lesson in how small the world really is.

Library of Congress Shares Photos

Just saw this blog post about the Library of Congress doing a project with Flickr. They are posting thousands of photos that have no known copyright. Some are missing info, and they are hoping people will annotate them and add comments. There are some great photos here, that can be used by anyone! If you add their Flickr site as a contact, you will be able to see whenever they add more photos.