Tuesday, March 02, 2010

NCCE 2010 -- Seattle -- Day 1

I have attended other, though not all, past NCCE Conventions. Although this event has some of the "crowd" feeling that most of these large professional gatherings, I've come away from a number of previous NCCE gatherings feeling that the time spent was quite worthwhile. I hope that will be the case again in 2010.

Today's NCCE activity was a 3-hour workshop called: Photoshop.com -- Online Photo Editing. Trainer/Facilitator was Joe Dockery. The focus of this workshop was to showcase what image-editing tools & resources are available through this free online website (http://www.photoshop.com). Aside from the very big advantage of this resource being free (offers 2GB of storage with the free account: more storage capacity can be purchased), a big huge plus to editing using Photoshop.com is that everyone accesses it via a browser. Therefore it doesn't matter what operating system you're using. You have online access & a browser? You're in! There is even an app available for the iPhone/iTouch and the Android phone.

This OS-independent factor is a significant "deal maker" in my situation where I have students with Windows laptops and others with Mac laptops. Finding software at a reasonable price (or, better, free) which is dual-platform is doable but often has other complications. Not so with Photoshop.com. The interface you work with on a Windows machine is exactly the same as on a Mac. This is GREAT!

Joe is an effective trainer and this was a rewarding session. As it happens, after signing up for Joe's workshop some weeks back, I came to the image-editing unit in my Laptop Prep class. Since having read about his session made me aware of Photoshop.com's existence, I went ahead and tried many of its features before NCCE came along. I chose to create a separate Photoshop.com site for each of my five sections and the site worked beautifully for the type of image-editing exercises we needed to do.

For the primary editing assignment, I supplied a wide variety of images (about 240) and uploaded them to each section's Photoshop.com site. After editing an original image, each student saved their own version. They assembled an album of all their edited pictures which we embedded as slideshows at our Laptop Prep Ning site (http://lmsprep0910.ning.com; you must join to access).

Is Photoshop.com a replacement for Photoshop? Or even Photoshop Elements? Not really. But it offers a lot for certain kinds of digital image projects. It worked out great for me and my kids!