Office Suites
I've been using Google Drive for quite some time. In fact, back in my day, it was still called Google Docs. When I hired into St. Joseph Public Schools in 20012, one of the first things I did was set up a Google Drive for my fellow elementary art teacher and I to share our ideas and catalogue our lesson plans. Google Drive, in a nutshell, has free equivalents of the main Microsoft Office applications - Word, Powerpoint, Excel - but with two huge added perks: accessibility and collaboration. I can access my Drive from any location. Most times, when working on homework or another project, I prefer to create a Google Document so that I can be sure to have it no matter the device on which I'm working. Where Google Drive differs from Microsoft Office is that everything auto saves and I can access it without having to email it to myself or bring it up on the same computer. Google Drive also gives me the choice on how to share the things I create. I can share them with others as "view only" or I can give others the chance to edit what I share. What's really cool is that when someone else is editing a document or presentation, I can see the edit in real time. A recent addition to Google Drive is the ability to download the app to a device. This allows me to drag and drop items that I would to appear on my Drive from my computer, and again, access them from any device.
Image Editing
Last year, I took a professional development class specifically to raise awareness of free iPad apps for art educators. One of the apps introduced was Sumo Paint. Sumo Paint was described as an app that was somewhere between Paint and Photoshop. I hadn't given much time to the app until it was mentioned again this week. I revisited Sumo Paint in order to make my screencast and found it incredibly user-friendly and intuitively designed. A lot of the icons in Sumo Paint correspond to those in Photoshop, but I think the layout and options are quite a bit simpler. I'm not an advanced user of Photoshop, so I'm not sure how Sumo Paint would compare for advanced techniques, but a lot of the basics of photo editing seem to be there. One of the downsides to using Sumo Paint is that it doesn't link directly to other Adobe products. For example, when I'm using Photoshop, I often bounce around and drag things to and from Illustrator and InDesign as well. While I'm missing that level of correspondence with Sumo Paint, for a free app that has many capabilities, I really can't complain.
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