Writing with pictures

I had a great meeting this morning and lunch with Lance Ford, who (if you don’t already know) has the most amazing car in Oklahoma. Lance had me thinking about a lot of possibilities for interactive virtual field trips at the Gaylord-Pickens Museum of the Oklahoma Heritage Association, where I work now. Using media to teach and learn can be extremely engaging. For our both virtual as well as face-to-face museum experiences, however, I want to strive to facilitate truly “engaging” rather than merely “enthralling” learning experiences. To that end, orienting people to think about capturing, creating and sharing their own stories and stories of people they know is very important for us.

As a visual person, I find it very powerful to experience a presentation which uses images well. In blogging, it is very important to utilize and integrate photos in posts. Because of this, I was delighted to learn about the free Photo Dropper plug-in for WordPress today. I learned about this from Michael Chalk’s post “Struggle with wordpress“, and got the link to Michael’s blog originally from a comment he left on my primary blog. Shazam! With just a few clicks, now a well-formatted and properly attributed legal photo can be inserted into our blog posts here on Learning Signs!!

photo credit: TooFarNorth

This plug-in provides a compelling reason to compose in the WordPress dashboard. To insert an image like the one I have inserted above, you simply click the editing icon in the upper right corner of the post composition window, enter your search keyword(s), and select the image you want to import: S, M or L. The image is sized correctly and includes CC credits. WOW.

I compose almost all my blog posts now with the software program MarsEdit. I wish MarsEdit would integrate this PhotoDropper functionality, to connect easily to Flickr Creative Commons images and insert them with a couple clicks. I’m going to teach my kids how to use PhotoDropper to insert images into their blog posts. Now it should be much easier and straightforward for them to write with pictures!