Thing 26: Media Skills

I love this kind of stuff! I truly think that the creative use of media can be one of the most effective ways to market your library program and the wonderful things that happen in and out of your library space. When I first started reading through the introduction of this "thing" and the "photos in education" ideas that followed, I was set on how I would apply this activity to student learning. However, once I got to the learning activity ideas, I became self-indulged in the new tools and how I can use them to help market programs and activities that are happening in the library.

I started off by playing with Collage Maker in BeFunky. It was interesting because it didn't not require me to login and allowed me to quickly build media for a variety of templates using my own photos or photos from Pixabay or Upsplash (which I had never heard of). This tool was easy to use and much like Canva, although it had fewer free options and designs. It was simple to drag and drop, edit text, font, and save to a variety of options, including Google Drive 

I was excited to try out the template that allowed me to add a header to my YouTube channel. I made my original header in less than 5 minutes and was super excited about the ease of it. Then I quickly
ran into trouble. When I tried to upload my header to my channel, it cut off half the image. This was extremely frustrating since the template was designed specifically for YouTube headers. I ended up spending another 30 minutes trying to find an image that would work for the small layout the was actually being featured in the header and working it so that it was just right. So this simple task turned into a much longer task than it needed to be.

I decided to experiment with a different feature and see how the ease of that was. I used the collage template as a way to build a graphic with photos, so that I could highlight all the students who had already finished their January Reading Resolution Challenge (featured in my last "thing."). Again this was fairly easy to use, but did lack a lot of cool options that were only available in the paid version. I became frustrated at first because the templates didn't have the amount of boxes that I needed and it seemed that only the paid version would shuffle them to work for the number of photos I had. After much exploring though, I discovered that I could start with more boxes and just delete the ones I didn't use. I played with all the features and tried to add banners and icons, but they were extremely limited in options. I decided to try and use the "photo editor" tool, but besides allowing me to alter the brightness, shadows, etc. I didn't have many options. As a result, I ended up with a basic collage, which looked good, but I didn't feel was as "eye-captivating" as I would have liked. Nonetheless, I was able to create a collage that I put on my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

I will definitely use this tool again to highlight my readers who reach their goals for the "Reading Resolution." It is a quick way to build a collage and post immediately. For anything that I want to look a little more professional though, I will stick with Canva. I can also see myself using it with my primary age students to build graphics and introduce basic media skills with.