Thing 3: Photo Fun

Okay, so I feel like my head is in a cloud sometimes, but now it is in an iCloud.

I love my iPhone, and really marvel sometimes at the tricks it can allow me to do, but the whole concept of the iCloud is totally amazing to me.  I am able to take pictures from my phone, edit them right then and there, and then -- without bothering to email them to myself -- simply access them from my laptop be going to my iCloud account.

If I become a little more savvy with this, I can see how I can quickly take a picture in class and then incorporate it into the context of a lesson just like that.

I am including below some pictures of some of my students wearing hats my mother and her friends made.  My mother is 88 years old.  She and her friends (they live in Virginia Beach) decided that my students in Rochester must be perpetually cold, because we are so far north.  She asked me if they could make us some hats, and I told her sure.  Little did I know I would be receiving 200 hats.  Practically every student at my school has one now, and whenever I see one of the brightly colored hand-made hats, I get a pleasant feeling.  They provide warmth in more than one sense of the word.

I took these pictures on my iPhone, saved them to the iCloud account I created, and then downloaded them directly onto my laptop.

It took a while to download each picture, and I discovered that if I tried to do more than one at once, that I invariably lost connection with my server.  This might be more of a personal WiFi issue than anything else, but I think that from now on, I will proceed in little chunks.  And save often.

My other valuable takeaway from this Cool Tool lesson was the flowchart Infographic in Samantha Lile's article "Can I Use that Picture?  How to Legally Use Copyrighted Images [Infographic].  Since we are doing curriculum writing at my school, I have had to realize that all the minor thefts that I have committed in the past, as I've cut and pasted images into documents I have been creating for my classes, are about to be broadcast to the world.  Yikes.  That means I need to go back and re-do my materials and replace anything I have used with permission with materials that are permissible.  It's a little bit scary, but I think the flowchart Ms. Lile provided helps to clarify what I can and cannot use.  It's a daunting task, but I have to get it done before everything goes public.  Wish me luck.