Aviary.com offers an online suite of free creation tools. How this site manages to offer such powerful features and remain free is beyond me.  I personally use the site for its wonderful photo editing options. As a matter of fact, with the help of toondoo.com, I was able to create the ITRT Happenings banner as seen above for my blog using Aviary. Aviary essentially mirrors photoshop and gives me the option to save my work to my hard drive or online (not to mention that it is also a few hundred dollars cheaper than photoshop). By choosing to save a creation online, Aviary automatically generates a link to the saved image and provides me with the HTML embed code so I can share my creation with with friends, family, and collegues. I recently had a sixth grade class work on a Google Earth project that required they insert images into their tour. It is a best practice for Google Earth images to be housed online in order for people who are looking at a shared .kmz file to be able to see those images while viewing the tour on a different computer than the one it was created on.  The class simply cut and paste the embed code into the google earth description box. When the students played the tour the image housed on the Aviary site would automatically pop up at the specified time in the tour. I am attaching a word file to this post with directions explaining how students can upload images and share them using aviary.com.  Aviary is definitely one of my favorite sites and one that I use daily.  If you have never used photoshop before, you will experience a bit of a learning curve.  However, there are numerous tutorials online explaining how to effectively use this site.

Click here to download the directions to save work to Aviary.com

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