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Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian from Northwestern University and the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection is a collection of over 2200 photographs of individuals from over 80 American Indian tribes taken by Edward Sherriff Curtis in the early 20th century.  Curtis’s photography emphasizes the theme of native people as a “vanishing race,” a belief that was widely held in his time and that has contributed to damaging stereotypes since then.  An excellent series of biographical and short historical essays, Edward S. Curtis in Context, provides background on the series of photographs and on Curtis’s views of native people and includes a very insightful article by David R. M. Beck on the myth of the vanishing race.  Be sure to read these essays before venturing into the photographs — they will provide tremendous insight!

While viewing the collection, visitors can search by keyword or browse the collection by the volume of Curtis’s original collection of books, by American Indian tribe, or by geographic location. Digital records for each photograph include Curtis’s captions, bibliographic information, and large JPG versions of each photograph, allowing the user to view them in great detail.  These photographs and the issues, interpretations and controversies that surround them, have the potential to spark interesting classroom discussions on more than just American Indian history. Students should also consider photographs as primary sources (are they untainted documentary evidence of the past, or can the photographers beliefs, choices, and staging present a false record?), and the complexities of ethnographic encounters.  Teacher resources from the Learning Page at the Library of Congress include ideas for using this collection to teach U.S. history, critical thinking, and arts and humanities.

Edward Curtis: Dialogue, a website from PBS station WNET, which produced an episode of American Masters on Curtis, focuses on the controversies surrounding Curtis and his photographs of American Indians.  The site focuses on five key issues surrounding Curtis’s work.   Curtis Photography: Stealing the Soul or Preserving a Legacy? considers American Indian responses to Curtis’s work. Dressing Up, Whose Idea Was It Anyway? addresses why Curtis chose to represent native people as he did and whether or not photos were staged to present a stereotypical image. Shooting the Sacred explores the controversies surrounding Curtis’s photography of sacred objects and ceremonies. Did He Show Us What Was Happening? questions the accuracy and completeness of the views of American Indian life presented by Curtis, and Who Was Edward Curtis? delves more deeply into the life of the photographer himself.  In each section, visitors can watch video clips of experts discussing Curtis’s work and the reaction to it in American Indian communities, participate in online discussions (which teachers should note are open to the public), or take part in a poll on the issues raised.

Collaborative Arts Resources for Education, a program of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Museum of Photographic Arts, and San Diego Museum of Art, presents a lesson plan on ethnographic photography for high school art students that uses Curtis’s work as the starting point for student photography projects. -KATHRYN WALBERT

Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian

Edward Curtis: Dialogue

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Pixlr is yet another adorably named online photo editor. With it, you can do a lot of the stuff that expensive programs like Photoshop does, except without spending money, or even downloading any software.

Like Splashup and Photoshop Express, Pixlr lets you upload and edit your photos, or enter a URL of an online photo you’d like to edit and save to your hard drive. You can create layers in your image, and manipulate the picture using a full compliment of filters, brushes, and so on. My only complaint, one I’ve noticed about all online photo editors, is that I can’t paste a screen capture (using the ALT plus Print Screen keys) into a new Pixlr file, though perhaps that’s due to user-error on my part.

Pixlr is a great, no-cost tool for art class, the school paper, a web design class, the yearbook staff, or for anyone who’d like to crop a photo or eliminate red-eye. True, it’s a lot like other no-cost tools we’ve mentioned. However, given how finicky some school firewalls can be, it’s best to have some options in case your favorite online tool gets blocked. -BILL FERRIS

Pixlr

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Let me preface this by saying that I love Flickr. I love it so much, in fact, that I pay an annual fee so I can upload an unlimited amount of photos and use all the other neat features that come with a “pro” account (you wouldn’t think that the “replace photo” function would come in handy very often, but it does!).

That being said, searching for images on Flickr can prove rather frustrating. Not only do the results sometimes seem irrelevant, but so many times I’ve been looking for an image to accompany something I’m working on — an article, a powerpoint presentation, etc — and I finally find the perfect image, only to realize that it’s not under the Creative Commons license. Frustrating!

Enter FlickrStorm, a neat little application that lets you easily search for images on Flickr with an advanced feature that looks only for those under specific Creative Commons licenses. It also finds more related and relevant images as it searches for more than just what you enter into the search field. FlickrStorm is an easy and thorough way to find images you need, without the frustration! -LAUREN FROHNE

FlickrStorm

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Okay, so you know how to create a mobile podcast. Your phone has a lot of other bells and whistles, too. Today you’ll learn to make the most of your camera phone.

Pictures and videos are probably the least-used cell feature by the over-30 set, and the most used by folks under 20. Catch yourself up by toying around with these apps.

1. Did you know you can upload pics to flickr straight from your cell phone.
2. Examples of what I take pictures of on Picasa (they don’t have a good way to upload from your mobile phone though, GRRR).

Hey, how about that video camera? If you shelled out big bucks for video capabilities, don’t let them go to waste.

1. YouTube mobile lets you upload or watch YouTube videos in the palm of your hand (and not even your school’s firewall can stop you).
2. Vimeo is a smaller service, but is focused on higher quality video than YouTube.

If you can send text messages, you can also email both text and photos (if you have a photo camera) from your phone. Just type in the email address given in the links above instead of a phone number. Blogging can be done on platforms like tumblr, just look under “goodies” on the dashboard. It will let you email by text. This is a great platform for documenting a summer vacation.

There you have it! You now have a fully functioning multimedia command center that fits in your pocket or purse. How do you use your cell phone for education? Let us know in the comments. -ALICE MERCER

Photo credit: KB35 on flickr

I’m completely fine with a writer who bends the rules. There’s a little thing called style, right? I’m sure that as an educator you’ve no doubt had a student try to pass off errors as style. I know I tried when I was in school.

As they grow and mature as writers, it’s necessary for your students to crawl before they can walk. They should at least know the ground rules before they start breaking them in the name of style. And as we all know, there are plenty of rules. There is one rule—out of a whole set of rules about the use of quotation marks—that can be very effective in conveying irony, sarcasm and subtlety. Or, it can be very effective in unintentionally looking ironic, sarcastic and boldly unusual. That rule is the use of quotation marks around words and short phrases.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks is a great site that features the abuse of quotation marks and the amusing results. While this site is intended to show the humor of misinterpreting other peoples’ bad punctuation, you can use it as an effective tool to demonstrate to your students what not to do. You might even want to mention that anyone can submit a photo to this blog. It could give your students a strange motivation to pay attention to punctuation as they walk around in their day-to-day lives. What sort of strange world would that be? –NICK YINGLING

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

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No longer will you take hours and hours to put together picture presentations for Open House, awards ceremonies, or end-of-the-year graduations. Liven up any presentation with the use of Photo Story 3 and your digital pictures. The program is so easy you can have a professional-looking presentation in just moments.

Photo Story 3 is a free download for Windows users. All you do is import your digital pictures into the program with the click of the mouse and you are ready to go. The program instantly assigns a different transition to each photo to give it that made-in-Hollywood look, and you’re done. The small file size makes it easy to send your photo story in an e-mail.

If you’re not happy with your initial story or need to edit something, it’s not a problem. The program allows you the freedom to move pictures around once you have imported them to help tell your story or sequence your presentation just right. With just a click of the mouse you can touch-up, rotate, change the assigned transition, or crop your pictures. You can also liven up your presentation by adding music or personal narration. You can help tell your story by adding titles or captions. Once you have completed your photo story you can view it on your computer, TV, or a Windows Mobile-based portable device.

Throw out those boring old book reports and let your students use this program to create movie trailers to tell about the books they’ve read. Initiate lessons and inspire students in the areas of science, social studies, and reading. Allow your students to create a multimedia project to present what they have learned from thematic units you have taught.  You don’t need to spend a million bucks to make your presentations look like a million bucks. -MONIQUE ST. LOUIS

Photo Story 3

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Oooooosaaaahhhhh! I just keep saying this site’s name over and over again. Ooooosaaahhhhhh!Okay, okay, I’ll stop. Anyway, Oosah is a neat Web-based application that lets you upload photos, music and videos — or use the media you already have uploaded to your Flickr, Facebook and YouTube accounts — to make multimedia slideshows, which they call “oosahs.”

But Oosah is more than just a place to make slideshows, it’s also an entire Web-based file management system. And, you have 2 gigs of space to play with for free! You can upload your photos directly to the site and easily manage them, or use it to safely store your videos and music files — whatever you want!

Oosah is emphatically not a file sharing site, like Mediafire or YouSendIt, though; it’s a user-generated content hosting, management, and sharing site. The content you or your students put on Oosah is only available for others to see if you make it public. And even the content you make public can only be viewed by others on Oosah, not downloaded or accessed in any other way. It’s open to anyone who is at least 13 years old and it has an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, so it’s the perfect place for your students to manage their media and get creative with slideshows and multimedia.

Keep in mind, though, that Oosah is still in beta, so expect some kinks here and there. I had a little trouble using photos from my Flickr and Facebook accounts to make a slideshow, but uploading files directly to the site worked super smoothly.

Oooooosaaaahhhhh! That was the last one, I promise. -LAUREN FROHNE

Oosah

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One of the neatest projects I ever did for a college literature class was to interpret a novel through a digital collage — and not just because it got me out of writing a paper. Creating a visual representation of the themes and motifs in the book let us tell a story through images rather than words and made us think about how the story would look if it were, say, a painting (not to mention, we didn’t have to write another paper).

If you’ve wanted to integrate digital collages and photo editing and sharing into your classroom lesson plans, but can’t find room in your already tight budget to invest in one of those expensive software programs, then look no further than Splashup.

Splashup is a free, full-featured online image editor that allows users to create new images, edit existing images and manipulate layers with all kinds of filters and brushes. The interface is easy to use and resembles Photoshop, Illustrator and other familiar photo editors. It’s basic enough for novices to get the hang of, but has sophisticated features that even professionals can appreciate. And did I mention it’s FREE?

What also separates Splashup from its competitors is that it seamlessly integrates with photo sharing sites, including Picasa, Flickr, and Facebook; which means you can import photos from those sites, edit them, and then export them right back for immediate sharing capabilities. You can even save your work in Splashup and come back to it later to edit it some more from another computer — oh, the wonders of data portability!

So, get those new media assignments on your syllabus ASAP. I promise your students will appreciate the change of pace — and not just because they don’t have to write another paper! — LAUREN FROHNE

Splashup

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I don’t know how we’ve forgotten to mention flickrCC for so long. Any time you see a photo on Instructify that isn’t a screen shot or logo of what we’re reviewing, it probably came from flickrCC.

What is flickrCC, you ask? It’s a search engine combs through free photo-sharing site Flickr for pictures that are shareable under the Creative Commons license. In layman’s terms, it means flickrCC does the legwork in rounding up pictures you can use in class so long as you give credit to the photographer.

What’s that mean for you? You now have a limitless supply of free photographs to use for class projects, clip art, presentations, bulletin boards, and anything else you can come up with. The only limit for most photos is that they can only be used for non-commercial purposes. A few may also require you to get permission before using, but I’d be amazed if they said no to a school. If you want to edit the photo, you’ll have to specify that in your search.

With flickrCC, you can add the power of images to any assignment without having to buy yet another clip art collection. -BILL FERRIS

flickrCC

Nick is working on an “adobe.” Can you say that with me? [Tour group responds, “Ahhhdoooohhhbeeee.”]
I’m sorry, I just had an 80s movie flashback. Now thanks to Adobe Photoshop Express Beta, you too can work on an Adobe (although, all the cool kids call it Photoshop these days).

So that photo of you has evil, red eyes? Or you want to add evil, red eyes to an existing photo? No more having to crank up your bulky Photoshop application. Just upload your photo and start tweaking. Adobe Photoshop Express Beta allows you to use a lot of the useful features you’re used to—all on the web.

Adobe Photoshop Express also lets you store up 2GB of photos, free of charge. That’s something that definitely comes in handy when you’re away from your personal computer but still want to show people all of the evil, red eyes you’ve added to your photos. –NICK YINGLING

Adobe Photoshop Express Beta

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