One common trend among teachers seems to be a desire to decorate their classrooms with nifty artwork or posters.  If you’re like me, you’ve probably even hung up printouts from the Internet in your classroom (of course, these are always images that you own or have secured permission to use).  If you have done this, you’ve discovered that it can be a bit difficult to enlarge an image to print on multiple sheets of paper.  Thankfully, there’s a Web 2.0 tool for that!

Today’s Web 2.0 Weekly feature is Block Posters, a super-easy to use site that lets you upload an image from your computer and scale it up to print on multiple pages.  Using Block Posters is as easy as uploading an image, choosing how many sheets you want it to print on, then downloading a PDF file that contains your image divided over several pages.  Because Block Posters creates PDFs, you can easily print your posters yourself or take them to a local copy shop.  The resulting pages each contain a border of whitespace that will need to be trimmed if you wish your poster to be contiguous or the whitespace can be left to create an artistic effect.

Strengths:

• Easy to use
• Many options for size of image
• PDF file makes it easy to print and store resulting poster

Weaknesses:

• Only accepts JPEG and GIF format images
• Printing text files would require converting to an image format
• Original image files are limited to 1 MB

This is a great tool for creating classroom decorations, but it can also easily be incorporated into student projects.  Students could use Block Posters to create maps, display artwork, or even use the poster as a component of an artistic work.  Check out their gallery of user-submitted posters for ideas.

Block Posters is totally free to use and there are no user accounts.  Block Posters does not save your poster for later access, so you will need to download the PDF immediately.  To use the tool, you will need a computer with Internet access, the images you want to upload, and a PDF reader.  Printing your poster will require a printer.  If you want your poster to be in color, you will need a color printer.  Printing any large color images may use a substantial  amount of ink, so use cautiously.