The first free online application I tried out was FotoFlexer. I was intrigued because I take a lot of pictures and have never played with a free editing program. I noticed free advertisements and was initially annoyed with that until I remembered that it is free and they have to make money somehow! The site looked easy to use and it was. I was able to figure out how to get started with no problems. I could have used their free sample photo but decided to upload my own which was simple following their prompts. I uploaded a 5x7 picture and it went pretty quickly. All of the actions were easy to understand and apply. The undo button took me a bit to find but didn't cause me any trouble when used. A lot of the editing tools had advanced options. You could do all sorts of things, including adding artwork and text to your photo. I am not sure I would use this for editing my personal photos that I wanted to print, but I would set my daughter free on this to play with her own photos. She would definitely have fun! In a classroom, I might use this to upload photos to our class blog, as an incentive computer activity, or maybe when students wanted to do something creative with a photo for a project, such as a book cover for a book report. There are many options for saving such as sending to facebook, Picassa, or just as a jpeg to your desktop. I chose to share the photo via URL/link here. Piece of cake!
The second online application I spent some time with was Zoho. Honestly, for much of the time I wasn't really sure what I was looking at. It seems to be something for the business sector, not so much for education. Maybe if you were teaching a business class and wanted to look at accounting reports, or if you were gathering/presenting data, it would be beneficial. There is an option for creating tests and quizzes that directly appeals to teachers, but I felt that it would be more appropriate for upper level classes. I found the site a little hard to search through and didn't feel like my questions were being answered even as I went deeper and deeper. I reviewed a chart describing some different subscription options and it seems that you don't get nearly as much for free as you do if you pay to join. I think Zoho can compare it to offerings from Google, and I personally think Google Docs seems much easier to navigate and work with with. I like knowing that there are free applications out there available to us.
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