Digital Self Portraits

As I’ve said before, we are in our first year as a 1:1 laptop school, so I’m trying to incorporate more open source, digital art.  This seventh grade project uses Picmonkey (an absolute favorite of mine - and now a favorite of my students, too.) 

I give students my camera and send them to the blank brick wall near my room.  They take turns taking some photos in various poses and then bring them back to me to load on their computers.

I ask them to experiment with all of the tools available to them to edit their photo and INCLUDE 6 WORDS THAT DESCRIBE THEMSELVES. 

I try not to hover too much as they work on these - I give them the written instructions and have them follow them step by step (excellent practice for them!) 

Here are the instructions: (Just a warning: these tend to change a bit every time they update their site.)

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Go to picmonkey.com.  Have your photos on your desktop.  Click the “Edit” button at the top of the page and then choose “Computer” and upload one of your photos from your desktop.  

All of the tools you need are along the side.  Each symbol has several categories of tools associated with it.  Explore by going down through the symbols and trying out the tools.  If you ever don’t like something, hit “Cancel” or the “Back Arrow” symbol at the top of the page to go the image as it was one step before. 

Remember you need to add 6 words about yourself to this composition in some way.  You can change colors, sizes and fonts under the  “T” symbol.  Also consider putting a frame around it (under the “frame” symbol).

When you are finished, hit “Save” at the top of the page and save to your desktop (in “Pierce” mode) with your name and Self Portrait as the title.

DO TWO VERSIONS of this assignment.

To turn them in please use Gaggle and put them in the Assignment Dropbox for our class.

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The students had a lot of fun with these!  I did this as a "step 2" after they had created drawn self-portraits.  

They did a really nice job expressing their personalities through the editing process and it was neat to see what they came up with (even if they did make up a few words of their own...!) :-)  

Happy Creating!!