This year I started collecting student work electronically from the beginning of school. Our school developed an information management system for students and teachers called MyDragonNet. As an elementary teacher, I find the system to have wonderful firewalls and safety systems, so much so that the parents (my primary clients) are locked out unless the students give them their password.  Because communication with parents is key to my work, I decided to look else where to find a home for my ePortfolios.

Look no further … Google Sites has allowed me to be as creative as I like. Seamlessly merged with Google Docs, Calendar, Picasa 3, YouTube, Google Videos, and Gmail (as well as what seems to be new programs every week) I have all I need to create and fly into Web 2.0.

Here’s how I started. Before starting with the class, I created my own template of what I wanted from each student. This gave the idea of what I was looking for.Once I was comfortable with the initial layout, it was time to roll it out to the class.

Each student created a Gmail account (although not necessary, in hindsight, it was the best decision). Each student had the basic requirements in front of them to follow. They could be creative as to the formatting their little hearts desired. I have a number of great sites. If you would like to actual examples, send me a note and I’ll be glad to have students share a site with you.

I have created a best of best page using actual kid examples. You can view it here. The sampls include tips for:
* Creating a Home Page
* Embedding Projects
* Creative Design options
* Sharing Your Writing
* Vodcasting and Podcasting

There was one sad note, the principal came by observed the creation of the sites. As he watched, he noticed a couple of girls chatting via Gmail. Unfortunately, he didn’t notice or realize their discussion was about the web sites. They were collaborating, he was worried they were playing. His trust of the kids wasn’t at the level I have. Sure, they’re 10 years old and they will make mistakes with electronic media. I consider mistakes a learning curve, not a loss of control. I would rather the mistakes come early and on my watch rather than later where kids might really get themselves into hot wate … at least now, I hope I can bail them out.

With the all new upgrade to Picasa you can put a name to faces. It sounds like a Facebook typs of way for tagging people. The new iPhoto ‘09 has the same type of interphase of face recognition built in to it. It’s worth taking a quick peak at it.

Tech columnist Walter Mossberg describes the “new and improved” features of the free Picasa 3 software for Windows, including creating movies from still photos, designing customized photo collages, and an amazing name-tagging photo feature.

Here is an article published on September 9, 2008 by Katherine Boehret.

Posting digital photos online to share with friends and family is supposed to be fun. You finally get to show your shots off to the people who waited weeks or even months to see them, and glancing through the images can conjure up memorable anecdotes. But wouldn’t it be even more enjoyable to look at pictures with the people in them identified so you can quickly find those shots with certain people you want to see?

People rarely tag photos because identifying and labeling the people in them is an arduous, manual procedure. This week, I tested the new version of Google’s free photo organizing and editing software, Picasa 3 ( picasa.com) and an updated version of its free online-sharing component, Picasa Web Albums. The Web component tries to take some of the work out of identifying people in your shared photos using facial recognition. It automatically isolates faces in your pictures, invites you to identify them by name, and then recognizes these faces every time they pop up in future pictures so they can be tagged with one click and no typing.

New and Improved
Picasa 3, the Windows desktop application, includes a handful of new or improved features, including smarter editing tools, like cropping suggestions, and a one-step process to share photos from desktop albums. It also has the ability to create movies from still photos; to edit video clips and to upload those movies to YouTube. Personalized photo collages are a snap to make, and pictures can be labeled with text right on the image.

But my favorite feature, the ability to name-tag faces in photos, is found in Picasa Web Albums.

When photos are uploaded from a personal computer to Picasa Web Albums and a user enables Name Tags, facial recognition finds all of the photos containing faces and then groups together the photos it thinks are of the same person. The user must create name labels to go with each face. Once a face is labeled, the program does a pretty good job of recognizing that face in subsequent photos and suggesting a name to go with it. These labels can be seen by you or others, if you enable visible name tags when sharing.

In Sync
Another plus in Picasa 3 and Picasa Web Albums is that both now clearly label all albums to show which are public or private, and which are set to automatically synchronize with the Web-based versions of these albums. And these two programs are smart enough to synchronize with one another using a single mouse-click. Picasa Web Albums worked so smoothly that I often forgot it was Web-based and not a desktop application. But all photo editing and retouching must be done on Picasa 3, the desktop program. This led to many moments when I became absorbed in Picasa Web Albums and looked there for editing tools before remembering I needed to return to Picasa 3 to touch up photos.

Likewise, name tagging can only be done on Picasa Web Albums because photos must be uploaded and scanned for facial recognition to work. I found myself offline in the Picasa software, noticing a photo with a face that wasn’t name tagged and wanting to label it, but not being able to do so without using Picasa Web Albums.

Some Back and Forth
I eventually got used to this back and forth between Picasa and Picasa Web Albums, but it could be a deterrent for some users. Google (GOOG) says it is looking into how to integrate name tags with its Picasa 3 desktop software. As for making a Mac-compatible version of Picasa 3, the company says it doesn’t have any plans to report. However, the Web component, including face recognition, works fine on a Mac, and Picasa offers a free uploading utility for Macs that allows pictures to be sent to Picasa Web Albums directly from Apple’s (AAPL) iPhoto software.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the process of labeling photos with name tags. This provided a new way to sort images according to who was in each shot, and Picasa even found some hidden faces of friends I hadn’t seen in photos, giving me a new perspective on an old picture. Of course, the system isn’t perfect. A few things — including a lamppost — were falsely identified as faces in my photo albums, and it even requested name labels for the faces in photos I took of Renoir paintings.

There’s no way to completely turn name-tagging over to Picasa; you must manually assign a name to each face. But this discovery process grows smarter the more it is used, returning accurate, selectable name-tag suggestions below each photograph. A People page lists all the people whose faces appeared in uploaded photos, and I started relying on this as a quick reference tool. A photo name tag can include a nickname, full name and email. If someone is already listed in your Gmail contacts, these data are automatically retrieved and entered as you begin typing a name.

A Sync button at the top of each album in the Picasa desktop software assures users that any changes or edits made to photos in albums on the desktop will automatically be reflected in the Picasa Web Albums. I tested this many times, and uploaded photos changed quickly to match the desktop copy.

Picasa 3 offers customizable photo collages and Picasa Web Albums uses name tags to label faces in photos.
Instead of uploading photos from Picasa 3 to Picasa Web Albums and then sharing them from there, users can now hit a Share button in Picasa 3 that uploads images and emails them in one neat step. Privacy status on all albums is clearly marked, both in the desktop software and online in Picasa Web Albums, so you know if your album is private or public. These options can be adjusted in Settings, where the language used to describe sharing conditions is very clear. I liked the useful editing tools in Picasa 3, including an automatic crop tool that generated three cropping suggestion previews per photo.

Getting the Red Eye Out
A new automatic red-eye removal tool returned accurate results; it was easier to use than most because it identified red eye for me so I could fix it with one click. “Fill light,” a standby in Picasa, is a movable scale that adjusted and brightened dark, shadowy photos that were originally hard to distinguish. I even found photos that I had not previously seen in their entirety — including shots of the inside of Notre Dame Cathedral and a favorite photo of me with friends in front of a sunset.

Along with these other features, Picasa 3 has a shortcut button for easy uploading to Google’s Blogger service and one-step Geotagging, which adds location tags to photos. This software also includes a nice-looking built-in photo viewer for looking at all images on your PC. Picasa Web Albums has a mobile component and a new way of finding public photos from around the world, called Explore, which reminded me of searching on Flickr.

If you’re looking for a richer photo-sharing service that doesn’t confuse users when it comes to privacy, Picasa 3 and Picasa Web Albums are well worth your time. And name-tagging will change the way you sort through photos, though it would be more useful if it was available in the Picasa desktop software, as well as on Picasa Web Albums.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Education is said to be cyclical. I’ve been around the block enough times and teaching for 20+ years, but I’m not sure what the answer to my question is. As a teacher technologist, I believe in using the tools of technology to help kids. Hey, face it, technology is a built in, self-motivating tool for many kids. When you think about it, how many kids are there NOT using a computer or a digi-tool at one point or another during the day?

Sure there are software programs that will really engage kids in the reading/writing process, but do we know it works? Is there hard empirical data to validate our assumptions? Most of the evidence I have found has been antidotal, not necessarily measurable. Often the data is from a combination of several different programs of hit and miss rather than a prescribed (I hate that word but I hope you get the jest of what I mean) or regimented program.

So I come back around to how do we improve reading/writing with the tools available in technology today? I would be interested in hearing your thoughts, I’m sure I’ll post more as the days go on.

Cheers to a new academic year!

I bought the camera through Amazon.com for $118, cheaper than the $149 I found around town and other stores.