This is a reflection post as part of a Professional Development course our school is undertaking.

In this module, participants were encouraged to investigate Picasa; a tool available on the Google Apps suite. The official video from Google below is a few years old but still explains the features of Picasa really well:

I must admit, historically I haven’t been a big user of Picasa. If I’ve ever needed to host an image, I would get by with other services like Flickr and Imageshack. I really didn’t see the need to upload personal image albums, but would rather back them up on local storage.

The thing that entices me to Picasa now is its obvious advantage of being linked in with google (and my ever increasing reliance on the google ecosystem!). Now that generous storage is offered, internet bandwidth has increased, and cloud apps are more accessible across devices and platforms, I can see a real merit. Now that I am also creating and sharing more digital content for both professional and personal use, it makes sense to have picasa stream-line my content, rather than having bits here and bytes there.

Being available for Google Education accounts is really exciting me. I think Picasa would be a valuable asset to the children’s tool box in terms of capturing evidence of their learning, and having it sync with their google account and keeping everything in one place. Shortly, we are enabling Google Apps for our students as part of our 1:1 laptop program; and I will definitely be giving some thought to how students can be using this tool to their advantage.

Do your students use Picasa in their learning?