Edit Photos with Adobe Photoshop Mix

I have always been an Adobe fan, and have been using Adobe software like PageMaker, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator since the beginning, in fact, that was one of the missing pieces on the iPad for me.  Well, Adobe is adding apps at a rapid pace.  I am excited about these capabilities on my iPad.  Photoshop Mix brings real photo editing to your mobile device.  The app requires an Adobe ID (it is free), but no paid Creative Cloud subscription, and runs on the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display.

Crop and straighten images, adjust exposure, contrast, clarity, and saturation or just tap the Enhance button to let the app figure out the adjustments for you.

The app is more like the Photoshop on your computer…. Dragging your finger over an image engages selection technology for finding edges and manipulating them, and a Feather Edges tool softens hard edges.  It makes working with a finger much easier on the iPad than if you were to use a stylus or mouse on the desktop.

Another new FREE app is Adobe Photoshop Mix

Description: 
Photoshop Mix makes it quick and easy to transform your photos anywhere you are. Cut out, combine and seamlessly blend pictures to create sophisticated multilayered images. Apply one of over a dozen Looks to select areas or your whole photo. Share with friends for fun. And refine photos further or incorporate them into other creative projects by accessing them inside new Photoshop Fix or sending them to Photoshop CC on your desktop. 
  • Cut out and remove sections of your images and merge photos using multiple layers.
  • Create sophisticated image blends by experimenting with different blend modes and Fill Opacities within each layer until you get the look you want. Mix includes some of the most popular blend modes from Photoshop CC.
  • Adjust colors and contrast or apply preset Looks (filters) to your pictures. Enhance the entire image, or just a portion with the touch of your finger.
  • Nondestructive editing means your original pics stay pristine and untouched.
  • Quickly and easily share your creations on social media.
  • Easily move images to and from Mix and a variety of Adobe desktop and mobile apps — including new Photoshop Fix and Photoshop CC — so you can access a wealth of additional features to get the look you want. It’s all powered by Adobe CreativeSync.
Tutorial:  

Have you ever wondered what you would look like if you were born in the Victorian era?

It is almost Halloween, not my favorite holiday, but here is a little fun for you this week.  Creepy Victoria Photo, iPhone/iPad app.  It is free, but does include in app purchases for selected features.  I challenge you to print and hang your creations on your office doors.  Enjoy!

Creepy Victorian Photo is a scary photography app where users can transform their portrait into a strange ancestral photography.  With Creepy Victorian Photo, the you can select from one of the 184 old Victorian portraits in which to add your face. So you will want to take a good selfie!  Simply take or import a photo and place you face behind the selected Victorian portrait. Apply photo-editing effects and choose from hundreds of ghost stickers to create a dark and mysterious portrait.  Share your portrait on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or by email. 

Features:
• Take a photo or import one from your album
• Both front and back cameras are supported
•184 adjustable layouts 
• Dozen of filters
• More than 200 scary stickers
• Control transparency, adjust light, contrast, blur and focus. Use pen and much more
• Add text and captions
• Save your creepy portrait to your device
• Share it on social media like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, & Email

Website:  www.creepyvictorianphoto.com for more information, including videos and screenshots of the app.

 


Apps for Keeping you & your family safe

A little different resource this week.  Unfortunately, I could not narrow it to just one.  I am sure there is something for everyone in these 6 apps to help keep you safe and protected.
"Last year, University of Virginia student Hannah Graham was murdered. Now three new smartphone apps are available for free download to help prevent such tragedies."
  • Companion: Never Walk Alone - Your Personal Safety Service and Mobile Blue Light: Companion lets you reach out to family, friends or your campus police and have them keep an eye on you as you travel late at night. Wherever you go, get there safely with a Companion!
  • Circle of 6: With Circle of 6 you have a new way to connect with your most trusted friends —to stay close, stay safe and prevent violence before it happens! It's the mobile way to look out for your friends— on campus or when you're out for the night.
  • LifeLine Response: LifeLine Response has a 100% FREE TRIAL and is your chance to test drive a personal burglar alarm! It requires set-up with info to identify you to 911 in case of emergency. Activate the app a few times during your regular activities. Be prepared, not scared! 

And the same day I heard a report on the radio about the 4Parents collection of apps that allows you to leverage technology to protect and manage your family.
  • LifeSaver by 4Parents: Helping save lives by preventing people from texting while driving.
  • ParentalBoard by 4Parents  Parental Board is an online parental control service that allows you to easily monitor, track, manage and secure your children's mobile devices (phones and tablets). Using Parental Control Board parents can track position of their kids, get a notification when kid leaves a predefined zone, get a notification when kid is in emergency, etc.
  • SquareHub Your Family Organizer: Shared Calendar, To-Do Lists, Locator, Photo Journal & Private Group Messaging: SquareHub keeps your family connected, organized, and happy. You can send private group messages and photos with each other, share calendars, share to-do lists, share child location information, and create those spontaneous moments of joy with the people who matter most to you, your family!  Whether you’re a family with young kids, mobile teenagers, kids away at college, or you’re a family living in multiple locations, SquareHub makes it easy for everyone in your family to stay connected! 

RefME app service to create bibliographies

RefME iPad App, FREE  RefME is a service to create bibliographies. It is available for Android, iOS, and browser-based tools to save references, sort into projects, and create bibliographies. 

There isn’t a perfect tool, but this one comes pretty close. It is worth acknowledging that RefME and tools like it don’t always format citations perfectly. That said, they are still valuable because they help get students into the habit of citing their sources of information and keeping a record of the sources they use. Moreover, if RefME bibliography generator does make a mistake, that can be turned into a teaching opportunity. 

Overview of how to use RefME’s browser-based tools.  

RefME: Referencing made easy  

RefME App tutorial:  

Stickyboard 2, FREE for a short time, normally $9.99

Stickyboard 2 

The Stickyboard 2 app is free today, but only for a short time, it is usually $9.99.

Stickyboard 2 is an awesome whiteboard app that allows you to capture your ideas, record your notes in sticky notes form, just like paper sticky notes. The app provides a tons of features that make iPad sticky note taking very simple simple.

Nothing beats a whiteboard and sticky-notes for capturing lots of loose information and seeing the big picture. Stickyboard 2 takes that flexibility and adds the convenience and power of your iPad. Don't worry about losing notes after a meeting again. It's much easier to carry around, and a lot friendlier for the environment.

Use any color coding system you like. Effortlessly move and group your notes - unlike paper sitcky notes, they don't fall off after too may moves.

The most exciting feature of Stickyboard 2 is something we call Magic Arrange. One of the biggest pains of working with lots of sticky notes is having to arrange and rearrange them. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just wave your hands and have them neatly arrange themselves? Well, with the magic of the iPad and Stickyboard 2, now you can!

Just select a bunch of notes, then swipe with 3 fingers to instantly arrange them into neat piles, or fan them out into a grid, columns, or rows.


SIMPLE YET POWERFUL
  • Stickyboard 2 sports an elegant and intuitive interface. Double-tap to add a note. Select and drag notes around with your finger.
  • You have a large, zoomable board to capture all your ideas. Zoom by pinching, and pan with 2 fingers.
  • It's easy to rearrange ideas, capture their relationships, and discover important patterns.
  • Use four standard colors (yellow, blue, pink, and green), plus 2 special ones (lavender and sunrise).
  • Draw free-form with the marker tool. Write, outline, and sketch around your notes.
  • Stickyboard 2 is infinitely flexible. Use your favorite real-world sticky-note and whiteboarding techniques.

Tutorial:  
Magic Arrange tutorial:  

Create Audio Slideshows Quickly with Sharalike

Sharalike is a FREE iPad app 

Sharalike is an easy to use and stunning photo slideshow creator with beautiful graphics, a music library and lots of sharing options. Easily create slideshows and share via email, Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, Viber, WeChat, Pinterest, WhatsApp, all from your existing cell or iPad pictures, digital photos and videos! Sharalike is also available as a web app. You can learn more about the web version here.  No account necessary to create. a slideshow,  however if you want to share (publish) your slideshow, you will need to register for a FREE account using your email address or your Facebook credentials.

Seven custom themes to easily create beautiful SHORT slideshows for any occasion including use in your classroom or special occasions and holidays such as, Mother Day, Valentine Day, Christmas, New Year Eve. Imagine what you could do with weddings, anniversaries, family or school reunions, or other special occasions! Using your photos and music you love, animate your old photographs and videos in remarkable ways with this online slide show app.   With Sharalike’s proprietary technology, you can store, sort, and edit your photos and videos—easily from the app. Create and share beautiful animated slideshows instantly!

Open the app on your iPad or iPhone or Android or go to the website on your computer, choose your images from your photos, change the order if need be and select some music to go with your images, that is all there is to do.  Deciding which pictures to use is likely the hardest thing!!  Sharalike will add automatically transitions, pan & zoom effects, as well as, lighting, no decisions to make on your part. There are only seven slideshow themes at the moment, but they are very nice, each theme uses different transitions and frames for your images. Sharalike has a small selection of free instrumental music or you can upload your own music.  But be careful using you own music, make sure you are using it legally  if you choose to share you production on the web for all the world to see. 

What Makes Sharalike Unlike Any Other Slideshow App 

  • Auto selects images from gallery and removes duplicates (and similar images)
  • Music options to suit your style that changes instantly for easy selection
  • Option to Save, Sort and Edit slideshows
  • Animated Slideshows created in seconds with no bulky video file!
  • Seamless Sharing via email, Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, Viber, WeChat, Pinterest, WhatsApp
  • Keep it Private with default privacy settings
  • Storage! With 5Gb of free cloud storage, there is plenty of space to use Sharalike as your main storage for your photos and videos.

Sharalike makes it easy to organize your photos and videos coming from any device, sort them automatically and turn them quickly into beautiful video-like animations in seconds to share.  They even give you 5Gb of storage for your photos. 

See how: 

Here is one I made in about 2 minutes! 

Resource for Wednesday: SoundCloud for Audio Recording & Podcasting

SoundCloud is excellent, and an extremely easy audio recording app. It is also a web-based tool https://soundcloud.com.  

SoundCloud really does make it simple to record, save & share your studio recording. 

Recently, SoundCloud introduced SoundCloud for Podcasting. It creates the RSS feed.  This is AWESOME,  Why?  Creating that RSS feed normally is not an easy task, but SoundCloud for Podcasting makes it effortless to publish your podcast to a variety of sources, including iTunes.   

 "We did the complicated stuff so you don’t have to. Upload to one place, and your podcast will play anywhere on the web, as well as in podcast apps.”

  • Embeddable players. Share your tracks anywhere on the web, while maintaining control and insight into play activity.
    Twitter cards.  Sharing your episodes in people’s Twitter streams is as easy as copy/paste. In fact, we have seamless integrations with all major social networks.
    Timed comments.  Get even closer to your audience. See what they have to say about your podcast throughout each episode, and respond! Whoever said hearing a podcast is a solitary experience wasn’t hearing a podcast on SoundCloud

Take a look at SoundCloud for Podcasting,  it is uncomplicated to publish your audio recordings now!!  

Maybe you have always wanted to publish a podcast, but were not sure how to make it happen.  The solution - SoundCloud for Podcasting and iTunes might just be exactly where you want your recording to be published. Problem now solved!! Record your class lectures, your students, instructions, thoughts, etc.

I was recently in an elementary classroom and the kids were recording themselves reading.  The teacher told me she was using SoundCloud to document their reading progress and test for reading fluency and she shares these recordings with parents. The possibilities are endless and now there is a simple way to record & share.  You can publish your recording pretty much anywhere, including CANVAS, your blog/website or even keep it private.

  • Link to SoundClouds directions  https://on.soundcloud.com/creator-guide/podcasting 
  • Link to Apple instructions for publishing a Podcast: https://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html (although you don’t need these if you are using Soundcloud for Podcasting)
  • Link to the iPad App:  
  • Link to the Kindle Fire App: 

    SoundCloud

    Product by SoundCloud Ltd. More about this product
    Price: $0.00
     (since our students are using Kindle Fires in Block C, a link the the app I am sharing for the Kindle Fire will be included whenever possible).

Soundcloud tutorial:  



Resources archived at http://cdk.posthaven.com

Friday Resource: Ignite Teaching: Collaborate on Multimedia Projects

 

Ignite Teaching: FREE APP:  The perfect tool for collaborative Project Based Learning through digital projects. Best of all, Ignite Teaching features detailed analytics that will allow you to assess individual student contributions in every group project. 

Students can finally collaborate on multimedia projects. Create the project titles and share with your students with an invitation code. Students join the project and build their slides that can include pictures, text, and video. 

Students can work on their part of the project on their own device and at their own pace. When the team is finished, they submit their work and you can see it from your account and know exactly who did what. You'll be able to see qualitative and quantitative analytics on individual student contributions in a group project through the assessment tools.

It also gives a link to view on the web.

Ignite Teaching allows you to have multiple projects running at the same time but, it is also possible to have students work on independent projects. 

It even has a browser version, but there are limitations and it warns you about accessing all features, to use the iPad app. 

  • Add text, images, and videos
  • Drag and drop content
  • Leverage layers and effects like transparencies, rotation, colors and border to customize content
  • Projects can be multiple pages
Getting Started on the iPad GUIDE: http://iurl.no/e82gs
Getting Started on the web version: http://iurl.no/7cu49 

iPad Resource Tuesday: Digitize Handwritten Notes and Diagrams with Office Lens

Office Lens -  Makes pictures of whiteboards and documents readable & editable. FREE

Office Lens,  is for converting pictures you take of notes on whiteboards or paper into notes that can be edited in Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. 

Office Lens can scan documents “from any angle” and fix its perspective, crop it, and clean it up. It can also do other tricks like pulling contact info off a business card and more.

Office Lens exports your notes in plenty of formats including JPEG, PDF, and even Office files like Word or Powerpoint.  Probably one of the best features of Office Lens  is that hand-written work can be captured through the app and separated from the text to move and edit as individual objects in PowerPoint slides.  Then you can export right to OneDrive.  We now have access to through our new Office 365 at KSU. 

 With Office 365 and the new Office iPad apps , Office Lens should be very useful. 

An Overview of Office Lens.   

Office Lens could be a great app for students to use to snap a picture of something on a whiteboard then add their own comments to it through word or powerpoint or right inside the app.  I think this new app is worth a try.  

And it’s FREE, so why not give it a try!!