 What's the best tool to use for creating graphics for moodle courses or courses that you're producing to teach online? I'm going to show you a brilliant technology. It's free and it allows you to make graphics for banners, for titles for the different units of your course and even lines which I use to divide the different parts of my course up. It's a free tool. It's really useful. It's lovely to use and I'm going to take you through a whole range of different activities. Really hope you liked the video and as always if you do please like it, please share it with other teachers, please comment on it and if you really like it please join me on my YouTube channel. Let's get started. So the sorts of things I'm talking about are things like these images here which is what we call thumbnails in YouTube or for example these kind of banners that you might put at the top of the course or for example the banners that I create for each unit of my course. So this is the tool photop.com. It's completely free. I'm going to start by showing you some super simple examples. I will show you slightly more complicated ones a bit later but let's do something really simple just to show you how to create a banner. I'm going to click on project and then what I do is I'm going to choose the type of banner that I want to create and what I'm going to do first of all is do a banner that I often put at the top of my courses when I'm working with mood and stuff like that. So I can just choose a size. I'm going to go for leaderboard. Then I just double click on any of the images and it will open up onto the screen and now it's ready to edit. So you have to put up with the adverts there on the right hand side but this side is completely free. They never ask you for any money and if you look here you'll see that this image is made up of layers. It's like Photoshop. It's actually quite sophisticated. Now the first thing we're going to do is I'm just going to come in a little bit closer just so that you can see a little bit better and if we notice here we've got this baby don't hurt me and I'm just going to click on that and right click that layer and delete that layer completely. Now I'm going to click on this layer and then I'm going to come over. In fact what I can do if I click on the layers just double click on the screen on the text and I'm going to delete that and I'm going to write Russell Stanard. I've probably zoomed in a bit too closer. Let me just come out a little bit. Zoom out a little bit so you can see it okay and straight away I've now updated that and I've put my imagine this is going to be a banner for example for my website or it could be anything if I just again if I click here then double click on the screen if I wanted to call this for example unit one yeah of my course then I've simply made that banner so it's that simple to do. Always make sure that you've clicked on the on the layer that you want and then just double click on the screen to text. Now the other thing is just to notice this as well if you click off the text and click on the move tool you could just grab that now and move it. See because this is a layer of this image then you can actually as long as you've got that layer and you're on the move tool you can actually move it around everywhere so that is how simple I could create a nice unit introduction and then all I would do is click on file and then come down to export as I'm going to export this as a jpeg for example I give it a title so I'm going to call this my course banner or unit banner so I'm a unit one banner and then I simply just click on save that will be saved in my download so I need to go to my downloads to actually find that image there it is and now I could use it so if I clicked on my downloads just to open up my computer for a minute come to my downloads then that image will be at the top unit one banner. You can just see how much I used this technology actually you can see here I've been working with it in the last few days and you can even see down here I'm always making banners and images for different things. Okay so that was a really simplistic idea of how you could use photope I'm going to show you something more sophisticated now we're going to start working with the layers I'm going to add text and I'm going to build it up and bring in pictures and I'm going to bring in more pictures and I'm really going to kind of build this whole thing up just incidentally if you are looking to learn more about moodle and how you would then put those images into moodle there's a video on the screen now that will take you through working with moodle and give you some really useful design tips on using moodle but let's move on now to the next part of the video so I'm going to show you some more sophisticated ideas now working with photope so that you can start to see some of the more things that you can do with it so let's start with a couple of ideas so I'm going to click on new project again again I'm going to come down and choose ads now what I'm going to do here is actually produce the header that we often have at the top of the course so not for the separate units but at the top of the course so a good size for this one can often be to use what we call billboard or large leaderboard okay or leaderboard they work really well I'm going to do large leaderboard let's do billboard simply because it makes it clearer so we'll click on that one now we get again loads of images quickly scroll down and find the one that you want okay one that I often I mean any of these will do a lot of them are nice because they don't have images and perhaps you don't want to work with images you can actually click here and just choose the ones that haven't got images in another one that's quite nice for courses if you scroll down that I use quite a lot is this one here it's quite a long way down it's this one here so I'm going to click on it so again just click once and it will open up now remember we've got this text here and we've also got this other layer now sometimes you do want the other layer so what I'm going to do in this time is click on the first layer first I'm going to double click on the screen and I'm just going to change this to to moodle course alright so let's imagine I'm actually building a whole course using moodle now I'm going to select that with the mouse okay select it with the mouse I'm going to increase the size slightly so I'm going to make that a little bit bigger don't worry that it's covering up everything else click on the move tool and then I'm going to shift that over to this side now I've got this other text so I'm going to click on here I'm going to double click on the screen I'm going to change that to Russell Stanard since I'm the tutor on the course and this time again I'm going to just select that remember you've got it selected you've got that layer selected it's the great thing about photopy so just hold your mouse down select it and again what I can do now is increase the size of that and I could if I wanted to even click here and change it to another font I'm not going to do that I'm quite happy again I'm going to click on here now and then I'm just going to put that underneath so really quickly there I've just produced a nice banner but this time I've used two layers now just to make a point here if you wanted to add another layer of text you can click on the text tool click on the screen and immediately you'll notice that a new layer is created now if I wanted to add something else here let's say it was the name of the university so whatever university or college or whatever you could add the university name then click on there and then put that somewhere else on the screen okay so immediately you've made a lovely banner for your course really really quickly and of course the last thing you need to do file and export as export it as a jpeg or a png jpegs are slightly smaller so click on jpeg remember to give it a name so I'm just going to call this top banner and remember also when you click on save that that will be saved in your downloads and there is our image and of course I can access it from my downloads so now we're going to focus on working with our own pictures or working with pictures that you've extracted from google and if you want to learn how to legally take pictures from google watch the video that's on the screen now otherwise I'm going to show you how to use pictures with photopea so let's go to another level this time what we're going to do is we're actually going to open up our own picture so I'm going to click on open from computer now I've got lots of pictures here that I've actually paid for or make sure that you use images that are on the internet that have got a creative commons license okay or anywhere where you can get images that are kind of creative commons free so you are able to use them I'm going to click for example on this image here let's work with this image in fact let's work with this image here quite like this one so I'm just going to click here and open that image onto the screen now this image is too big but watch this I can click here on the crop tool and then what I want to do is click on free crop and now what I can do is I could kind of move this tool move this and then move this and kind of crop it so I've got a completely different image now if I'm happy with that just click on the tick and now I've got a completely different image okay I can resize the image afterwards if I want to now as I showed you in the last video what I can do now is click on text click on the screen now I might want to change this so I'm going to for example use kind of a white text and I can also if I want to even change the font that I'm using etc I'm quite happy with this I'm just going to put here moodle course I don't know why it came out red I made a mistake now I just have to change it but I'll do it afterwards moodle course with rustle standard don't worry about the fact that the words are going off the screen because I can click on here move it onto the screen where I want it let's say down here double click again on the screen I'm going to change that just make sure that I've chosen white and I know I didn't do I didn't click on okay now if we click back on the move tool so we deselect the text now we can see and we can kind of place it where we like I might put it over there okay again if I double click on the screen I can always increase the size of it change the font etc to change the font just click here you've got all sorts of fonts that you could work with okay so if I for example let's say what's just change this one here and then it will completely change but you notice it's now really big so you would then probably need to resize it down a little bit again you could use the move tool to move it so that would be another possibility I want to make sure it's nice and clear and then again when you want to just you know click on the move tool and that will and then allow you to move it and there we are you've got the image you want and of course what you would do then is go file and export as and again save it as either a png or jpeg and then you can make access make use of it remember you could always add more layers so if again you wanted to have I don't know the title of the university you could come down here and click again on text click on the screen immediately adds another layer and then let's say you know university name and again you could then place that somewhere else on the screen use the move tool move that wherever you want it to be and of course if you wanted to you could change the font of that as well put it back to anything else and remember to move the move tool might help to decide where you want to place it okay just a matter of playing around I love these layers once you get used to them you'll see that they can really help you because of course you could do the same if you wanted to add another image as well so I have two images though normally with a banner I think one's enough just a really quick break from the video I hope you're enjoying the video and if you are please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com loads more free videos that you can access you can also find out about all my courses they're always advertised on the opening page and please sign up to the newsletter if you sign up to the newsletter you get updated with all the blog posts the webinars the online courses and the videos and at the moment if you sign up there is a 12 part free video course in using technology in teaching and I send you a video about every five days let's get back to the video here we can see a Moodle course that I'm currently developing and you'll notice again that I've used photopeed to make these banners at the top of each of the units of my course but another thing I like to do is have these nice thick red lines that kind of show where the course or the unit starts and ends and I'm going to quickly show you now how I do that working with photopeed when you're working with photopeed you're not actually forced to only use templates you can do anything from your computer etc what I'm going to do is just click on new project and show you another little idea and in this case what I'm going to do is simply have a black line so in fact we'll make it a red line and I'm not going to choose any of the templates I'm simply going to say width 120 but the height here I want the height to only be sorry 1280 and the height I want to be just 15 so I'm going to make a nice long line and maybe might be too long I'm going to set it to 800 so I'm just changing the width simple as that very simple and I'm going to change the color I'm going to click here because I like a red line so I'm going to click on that so I've now chosen red I'm going to click on okay and now all I need to do is click on create and the red line is created it's that simple using photopeed to make these kind of quick images lines that I often use when creating a course again you would now just need to save that so again click on export as export it give it a name don't forget to name it and then click on save and that will then be saved as a line that you can then download and make use of and it'll be of course in your downloads really hoped you liked that video please come over to teachertrainingvideos.com loads more free content and you can see all of my courses on the opening page don't forget to sign up to the newsletter that way you get updated with all the latest blog posts the webinars the latest videos and the courses of course you can subscribe to my youtube channel don't forget to click on the bell that way you'll get all the updates and finally if you do want to contact me perhaps about doing a conference or doing some training with your organization you can contact me from the website thank you very much on the screen now there are some more videos that you might find useful all connected to working with Moodle and designing online courses