Jennifer Bolton is married with two boys, both special needs. She is the owner of the Special Needs in Homeschooling. Jennifer uses free resources for teaching whenever she can, to keep her boys’ interests and to tailor their learning experiences to their individual learning styles and special needs.

As home learners we like to cut costs. We also enjoy learning while cutting costs! My boys love playing with digital photos so we were very happy to find a FREE tool called StainedGlass Collage. It is a website that allows us play with photos, learn, and make homemade gifts that we can share.

“With StainedGlass Collages you share more than just collections of photographs; you share entire events. Simply upload your digital photos and then follow our simple instructions. Within minutes you will have a beautiful StainedGlass Collage that you can email to friends, print out and frame or publish on the Internet.”

StainedGlass Collage is so easy to use, my 9 year old son can do it independently. You can make as many collages as you want and uploading is easy. If you have Java, just drag the photo from your file and drop it in the space that says Upload Photos and viola, you have photos to pick from for your collage. Click create collage and it’s finished.

You can personalize your collage by choosing landscape or portrait orientation, choosing the photo size,  and by adding a colored frame. You can also re-size the individual pictures and move them around so only part of a picture is shown in each photo space, which means no cropping before hand!

We made a collage about a field trip we had to the Battle of Stoney Creek Re-enactment.

You can print the collages right from your computer or share them through email or embed them to a website. StainedGlass Collage also has some new features; print your photos and collages through Fujifilm Print Services and transfer your photos to Flickr or take photos from Flickr for your collage. The quota is 250MB. We have made many collages and saved them to our desk top.  Then we delete the ones we have already saved from our StainedGlass Collage account so we have room to make more!

If you would like to share your collage, you have several options. You can save your collage as private (only you see it), share (only through email), and public (posted to the collage directory and visible to everyone). Each of these features have extra advantages. Private allows safety for those photos you don’t want to share but want to print off and just keep in your home. Share has a special feature that allows you to insert your collage into a beautiful template and email it others.  Check out some of the templates here. And see the one below.

StainedGlass Collage has many different email template options for different holidays, creating an EXCELLENT gift for family that lives far away. I’m just going to email them photos of the boys in a collage and in this beautiful email card!

Cost? The only cost to use this if you use the extra features through the other websites like Fujifiilm. To make your collage and take advantage of everything else StainedGlass Collage has to offer is absolutely FREE!  StainedGlass Collage also offers the ability to create a FaceBook friends’ collage using their mixpixx Application.  This application “creates visually pleasing collages from photo regions of your FB friends.”

For more information about StainedGlass Collage, watch this video tour of their site!

With StainedGlass Collage, my boys are able to create, organize, and share with others in a creative easy way. We had so much fun! Sign up for FREE and let us know what you did with your Collage!