Weekend Website #34: Block Posters

Drop by every Friday to discover what wonderful website my classes and parents loved this week. I think you’ll find they’ll be a favorite of yours as they are of mine.

posters

Age:

Sixth-high school

Topic:

Art, or to support any academic topic

Address:

Block Posters

Review:

What a great way to upsize student projects. Simply upload a digital picture created by students. Tell the program what size you’d like the poster and the program automatically figures out how to lay it out on 8×10 sheets and its ready to print.

I found this for a Photoshop class I teach. The summative project is a poster that communicates the student’s thoughts on a topic of global importance. They are instructed to find about twenty pictures, use their newly-honed Photoshop skills to format the pictures and collect them in a collage that tells the story they’d like told. With that many pictures, I worried they (and the accompanying required text) would get lost in the minimalist size of the page.

No longer a problem.

Here are a few issues we faced using it to print a collage:

  • The image upload is limited to 1 mb. We solved this by saving the jpg in a lower format. Photoshop makes it easy to do by showing the file size as you adjust the slider for quality.
  • Be sure images are of a good enough quality level to be printed poster-size. You don’t want the pixels to show
  • Make sure students are aware of the option to select the poster size. You don’t want massive 32×40 posters printed on school ink (like happened in my class)

That’s it. Students were excited to see their artwork printed as a poster and hung around the school.


Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Author: Jacqui
Welcome to my virtual classroom. I've been a tech teacher for 15 years, but modern technology offers more to get my ideas across to students than at any time in my career. Drop in to my class wikis, classroom blog, our internet start pages. I'll answer your questions about how to teach tech, what to teach when, where the best virtual sites are. Need more--let's chat about issues of importance in tech ed. Want to see what I'm doing today? Click the gravatar and select the grade.