BP4_2009111_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools

I learned how to use www.repper.com. It was this really cool site where you could take any picture and create a pattern using the picture. You could also use preloaded patterns to start with as well. To change the pattern, you simply clicked the edge of a highlighted portion of the pattern and drag it to change the pattern in any way. So, from one picture you could make an unlimited amount of patterns. I thought this would be an awesome Web 2.0 tool to use in my Journalism class because in the yearbook we are often struggling with new and exciting ways to create layout designs for each page. A yearbook is so large that often it begins to look repetitive and boring, or it takes so long to do each page that by the end the pages become less visually exciting. This would be one really easy way to use photos that the students have taken all year long to create different and interesting backgrounds for each page. The website says that the patterns you create can be used as Creative Commons, but I would do more research before using any of the patterns in a published yearbook, in case there are more copyright policies that the site does not state just to be safe. If nothing else, the students can create interactive backgrounds that they could use for their online profiles, etc. It would be really fun to give one class the same picture and see the vast differences in patterns each student makes from just one starting picture. It would even make an interesting writing prompt in English about how differently each student works.

Ludens, S. (2009). Repper: Images become patterns. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://repper.studioludens.com/#