The first positive you will notice about Picasa is that it is FREE. The second positive; Picasa locates all of the photos on your computer and brings them to one place. This means that you can view a lot of funny photos that you had forgotten about 🙂
While exploring Picasa I came across the ‘People’ feature. This feature uses ‘face-matching technology’ to recognise each of the faces within your photos. While it isn’t always accurate I still think this is a great feature. Students or parents could use this feature to easily and quickly find photos of themselves, or in the parent’s case, their children.
Picasa could be used within a school setting to share photos with students, teachers and parents. This tool would be a great way to keep parents up to date with everything that is going on within their child’s classroom. Picasa could also be used by teachers as a visual record of activities they have produced within the classroom. Teachers can share ideas with each other by uploading photos to their web albums (although I am not sure how private these web albums are).
Students could also use this software to:
- Create their own photo albums
- Upload and edit pictures from the internet to use in school projects
- Upload and edit their own photographs and create their own albums to share
While the effects in Picasa are not all that amazing, they are still easy to use, making Picasa easily accessible to primary school aged students.