Instructify

Sharing photos on a class website or as evidence for your teaching portfolio is a great way to highlight what’s happening in your classroom. Often, parents, teachers, and school districts worry about privacy violations when the issue of photos and other student work comes up, and it never fails that the kid with the most FERPA restrictions is the one that ends up in every photo. An easy way to anonymize those students and their work is to use the free photo editing tool, Picnik.  You can use the standard black bars, if you want,  but Picnik also has the option to use stickers (clip art that can be resized and placed anywhere on the image), textboxes, and even freehand doodling to make those hidden kids look less criminal than if you used the black bars. If you’re sharing examples of student work, you can easily block out the students’ names. It’s yet another program that lives in the cloud, so it works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. A premium version offers additional fonts and tools, and costs $24.95 a year — much less than more well-known products.

Separate from using the tool to keep everything legal on your site, kids can use it to create and embellish photos that they take. Because Picnik integrates with several major online photosharing sites (flickr, webshots, photobucket, and others) as well as letting you upload directly, it’s easy to get started. It doesn’t even require you to register!  The tight integration with flickr sets it apart from other free photo editors. Used in conjunction with flickr, you can edit your photos and save them back to your account (in flickr, just click on “Edit Photo” from the choices above your photos) and take advantage of the privacy settings that flickr allows you to set up.

And, if you’re trying to figure out whether or not you should post student photos and work, this post from Scott McLeod’s blog “Dangerously Irrelevant” gives a good overview for determining who and what can be seen, and how to set up a policy beforehand. -GRETCHEN SCHAEFER

Picnik

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