Open Source Applications

I looked at three different open source applications. I explored Zoho, Picnik, GIMP and Phixr. I am also familiar with Picasa and Open Office. The school I work at only uses Open Office. We no longer have access to Microsoft programs,althought we do have Adobe Photoshop. We also use Picasa to organize and print the photos we have taken throughout the year. Here are my thoughts:

Zoho: This application seemed to be pretty comprehensive. I played around with it some. It seemed to offer many user friendly applications in one area. I am wondering if a school could operate on this system as we are operating on Open Office. It has definitely saaaaved the district money. It is interesting to think that you can share documents instead of emailing them. I also found that you coudl work collabratively on a document.

Picnik: I really like this application. It was pretty straight forward and very similiar to Picasa. It seemed to have all the editing tools that I needed and was easy to download and get started. As with other applications, I could send it the edited photo to my flickr account.

Phixr: This is another photo editing application and is the least favorite of the one's I sampled. It didn't seem to have the tools I was familiar with although I could send it to my flicker account as I could in Picnik. It was fairly simple to download my picture and was just as fast as other editing programs I have used.

Open Office: As I said before, our district no longer uses Microsoft Word, but only uses Open Office for our word processing needs. It did take some getting used to, but most of the applications are similiar to Microsoft. It doesn't really offer a user friendly way to make a calendar or produce labels, but it can be done. I do all my lessons and newsletter in this program and it works fine. It has saved our district some money. It will convert other programs to Open Office as well. It has worked out well and I use it at home also.

Picasa: I do love this photo editing program. It is user friendly and has all the tools I need. It has some other features that I didn't notice in the other programs. I made a collage of my students to put on my web page and it allows me to do quick slideshow. This is great! My students love it when we come back from an event and I can show them the pictures right away. The slide show does not allow me to play music with the pictures, but it allows the students to see the pictures quickly.