Aviary+Suite

=**Aviary Suite** =

Overview:
  Link to Aviary Suite ||  ||< Aviary is a suite of online editing tools. Within this set of applications you can make and modify pictures and audio recordings as well as create drawings, backgrounds, vector images, and custom color palettes. These creations are then available to download or to share online through a variety of embedding options. This is a free site although sign up is required and there is an premium version available for a yearly fee. ||  || 
 * < [[image:Aviary_logo.png width="240" height="57" link="@http://aviary.com/"]]
 * Educational Benefit:**

The benefit of a site such as Aviary is that you have many powerful tools available that would otherwise cost a significant amount of money. With this suite of tools you can accomplish any task that you would use Photoshop or Fireworks for. A secondary benefit is storage and portability of your work. You are able to save all of your work to your Aviary account which makes it accessible to you on any computer. Anything saved in Aviary can be opened within any of the other Aviary tools (except, of course for the audio editor, Myna). You can work on a picture with the photo editor, Phoenix, and then open it in Toucan, the color editor, to create a custom color palette based on the colors that are present in your picture. While the educational benefit of each application is more fully discussed within subsequent pages, the overall power of a suite of applications such as this is the latent creativity that students are able to tap. Pictures can be edited and grouped in ways that allow students to visually represent content. They can use these tools to show the connections that they are making rather than simply copying a format presented in class. The ability to work with audio adds another layer to this constructivist approach as students are able to develop their own narrations. In truth, the only missing aspect, and a surprising one at that, is a video editing application with which to tie all of this, pictures, audio, and video, together.


 * Drawbacks:**

These tools are not simple to use; they require time, practice, and familiarity in order to gain competence with them. While some of the applications have well designed tutorials that clearly demonstrate the key functions of the tool, other applications do not. Patience is required in order to use these tools and that is something that learners do not always have. The way some of the tools function seem counter-intuitive which can further erode patience; new users need to work through simple tasks in order to gain basic competencies before they tackle more challenging tasks. While this may seem obvious, it can require a time investment that teachers do not have as you cannot sit typical students in front of these applications and expect them to create quality products. A secondary concern is the requirement to establish an account using an email address. One way to work around this is for a teacher to set up a gmail account and then set up "sub-accounts" to that initial account (such as mcarothers@gmail.com as the main account and mcarothers1@gmail.com, macarothers2@gmail.com, etc. as sub-accounts). This can be time-intensive but it does address any concerns regarding students using their personal email account. Like many Web 2.0 applications, there is a community that shares their creations. While it is doubtful that anything truly inappropriate will be posted, it would take too much time to continually monitor that community to insure there is nothing someone might object to. A greater concern would be students sharing pictures within this community as many parents are very concerned about who can see images of their child. Students would need to keep any of their creations private. This would extend beyond pictures of themselves to pictures of their peers.


 * Literature review:**

As Aviary is a specific site, and a suite of tools, I was unable to find any specific articles related to its use in educational settings.

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