Week 3, Thing #7 Technology

This 'thing' is to report out on technology - very open-ended, hard to know where to go, but I have so many irons in my life fire and technology is definitely a part of it. So I checked out Cafe Press.

I do audio production work for Jackie Baldwin, the host of Storylover's World on KSVY 91.3, Sonoma. She has a wonderful web site, Story-lover's World, with information about stories and folk tales from all over the world. Jackie has done a tremendous amount of work to make her website accessible and useful to storytellers, librarians, and especially teachers. And in her work, she has uncovered hundreds of wonderful, old, out-of-copyright pieces of artwork that will make fabulous notecards, t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs, aprons, baby clothes, and many many more things that she can sell without having to do the actual production work.

Her problem is getting the images ready to upload and set up shop in Cafe Press. It is very time consuming for the initial startup, but once it's up, the sales will take care of themselves and the 'proverbial' money will start rolling in. Jackie is a retired film producer, and she doesn't have much income, so having her Cafe Press site up and running will be a huge benefit to her. And she said if I help her get it going, she would share with me, so I am motivated doubly so!

So in researching Cafe Press and getting images ready to make products I learned that images in a '.png' format are much superior to those in '.jpg'. With .jpg you get 'ghosting' or fuzzy little pixellations on the edges of your picture. I never noticed it before, and well, honestly, to my eye, still don't notice it, but I have seen mugs and shirts where the image is not that pristine, and I guess if you are transferring your image to clothing or mugs, ghosting really picks up.

I also learned more about tagging images. When you are preparing a product for sale, you want to get as many targeted hits as you can, so you need to think like your customers and think about what the people who would buy your product might be looking for and keep those tags specific, yet encompass the topic areas. These tags allow your product page, or your virtual 'shop' on Cafe Press to come up in a search.

Now how would this transfer to the classroom/school? Well, you can make just one t-shirt without the huge expense of a template that we have here in town when we want to do t-shirts for events like homecoming. And with Cafe Press, classes could upload their image to the site and then only the students that actually want it could purchase it. That way - no overruns on t-shirts that get handed out by the MAC team for dress code violations!!

Cafe Press is also great for individuals and families that might want to make gifts of things like mouse pads, or coffee mugs, etc. with family photos or images. You could also do a shirt with your child's artwork. And the best part is that for families and their friends you can 'open up shop' free of charge. There would be no need to try to reach customers if your images are family things and you can easily direct your family to your Cafe Press site.

So! Technology - wow, we are only limited by our imagination.

Classroom Learning 2.0 - The 23 Things