Soft Technology

by Brian McLane Twitter: @brian_mclane Website: techmantraining.com Secondary Educator - 32 years, Ed-Tech Junkie, MA Teaching & Learning with Technology, “Head in the Cloud; Caught in the Web” Chromebooks for Graphic Design? I teach a high school desktop publishing class which includes graphic design, page layout, image editing, and more. We can use Chromebooks for almost everything we do. And we use completely free cloud software to do it. No Adobe Creative Suite, no Microsoft Office, no expensive, high-learning-curve software. Should I be teaching industry-standard software? Why ? I teach the concepts; the tools don't really matter. My students can learn the basics in the numerous free Google Apps and Web-based applications that are available for graphic design. Let's take a look! Image Editing One of the first things my students need to learn is image editing. Google Apps offers more image editors than we will ever need! Our go-to app is Pixlr . We use the Pixlr Editor,...

Guest Blogger Charly has been a camp counselor, K-12 math tutor, and collegiate print and digital journalist. She’s currently enjoying writing and snowboarding in Utah. Have you ever wished there were an easy-to-learn design tool which would let you and your students fry up print and digital documents in the cloud? What if it were completely free and ran from your browser? Lucidpress leverages a powerful yet user-friendly interface to bring image and text editing capabilities to your fingertips. Both beginning and advanced teachers and students can jump into Lucidpress and learn the tools the first time they use it. The best part is that unlike other programs, Lucidpress allows for real-time collaboration: between teachers, between groups of students, and between teachers and their students. Lucidpress is a web-based design tool that is ideal for making posters, flyers, and digital yearbooks and newsletters. You can create professional-looking documents—both print and digital—withou...