Dreaming of winning the Powerball jackpot? Sorry—I can’t help you with that. Wishing you could spend some time on deserted tropical island? Nope—I can’t help you with that either. But if you’re looking for a free online photo editor, I can definitely make a cool recommendation!

Introducing PicMonkey, a pretty powerful yet user friendly photo editing service with lots of bells and whistles—filters, effects, frames, overlays, stickers, textures and more! Just upload or drag and drop a photo into the site and edit to your heart’s content! Users can also crop, change exposure, adjust colors and add text to their project. Another great feature is being able to watch live as your image is being transformed into a work of art right before your eyes!

Once your masterpiece is ready to go, PicMonkey allows you to share it with the world via email, Twitter, Facebook and/or Pinterest. Finshed products can also be downloaded to your computer. And as an added bonus—multiple images can even be arranged into a snazzy-looking collage using another one of the PicMonkey tools.

Oh, and did I mention that PicMonkey is super fast? Yep, it’s true. The process of uploading and editing images has never been quicker.

From an educational standpoint, PicMonkey is the perfect tool for use with students who do not have an email address as it does not require a registration in order to use all of the photo editing tools. However, if users want to give their images some additional love, they have the option of upgrading to a “Royale” account.

Here are a few PicMonkey samples created by students in my Multimedia class.

Perspective is Everything—By Wesley M.

Warped Tour ’12—By Alyssa L.

Classroom Connection:

If you want students to experiment with editing images for use in classroom projects— digital stories, presentations, reports, posters, advertisements, comic strips, wikis and/or blogs—then PicMonkey could be just the tool you need. As my students say, it’s “boss”. And of course, they are always right—right?