Picnik

“Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools.” Picnik is full of tools to make your photos better than they already are! You can add texts, shapes, borders, backgrounds and much more. Picnik is a website where you can register for free and use all of these special effects on your photos just by logging in. Picnik is a great software to use in the classroom for all sorts of reasons. If the students do a holiday project the teacher could use picnik for special effects on photos. Along with projects, picnik could be used for label different things. For example, if the students were doing a unit on reptiles, the teacher could take a picture of a snake and load it into picnik and then use the text option and label the photo as “snake”. It’s a great way to allow students to be interacted in many different ways!

To download and create an account of your own, click here!

Excellent / Good / OK / Fair / Poor
Use
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Cost (After free registration)

Online Tutorial:

First, go to Picnik’s homepage. (Link above)

To create an account, follow the few simple steps which allow you to become a picnik member.

Once you have you registered for free, you will be to the welcome page.

After arriving to the welcome page, you are ready to get started on your photo editing, and exploration with picnik! You click on the upload photos link on the left side of the screen, and then choose the photo you want to edit, you will be able to begin.

For my example, I chose to edit the picture of the snake to go along with the reptiles unit mentioned above. To add a label, which would be most beneficial in the classroom, you would click on the create tab (arrow above).

Once you clicked on the create tab, you then will click on the text tab (as shown below)

After you have clicked on the text box option, you will be able to choose any font you would like. In order for the font to show up on the picture you must type the desired font in the box that looks like this:

Once you’ve typed whatever it is you want the photo to say, click add and you will see that your label is on the photo!

Next follow the arrow above to get to the save option.

There are many other ways that you can use to edit your photo, this is just one example. Once you are satisfied with your edited photo, be sure to save the image and then either begin a new photo, or log out!

I hope that you enjoy using picnik, and can find that there are several ways that you can use this simple tool. Through much exploration and testing of different options within the software, I hope that you will find that there are many ways to enhance your photos!