Digital Photography

This morning my friend Jessica and I wandered around the Education building (it was a rainy 7:30 a.m. morning so we didn't venture outside) looking for geometric shapes to capture with a Nikon digital camera we checked out from the department. We were on a scavenger hunt I'm sure elementary school students would love, and when we had all our photos, we came back to download on iPhoto and play with our pix on Comic Life. We had to jump right into the software with little instruction, using trial and error to get our files to fit in the boxes of the comic strip templates. We had three pictures of four shapes: a smoke alarm, a ceiling fire extinguisher, and a door lock, for example. There are speech bubbles we inserted to each shape and a text box to provide the geometric shape definitions.

I remember the American West Heritage Center fieldtrip our life skills/special ed. class took a few years ago. We took a digital camera along and snapped pictures of the kids with the pygmy goats, riding the hay wagon, and entering the indian teepee. Back in class the next month each student selected favorite digital photos from the day, narrated his/her favorite memories, and created a digital scrapbook. A major highlight was the picture of me and the duckling that had just pooped in my hand; the kids all loved my surprised/disgusted face. It trumped all the other farm animal pictures of that day but something about which each child had MUCH to say (with just as much laughter!). We worked for hours on these CDs and the students received a copy to take home for the summer. Parents said that these programs were more popular than any cartoon. That project was just one of many that featured digital photographs in and out of the classroom, and I am sure that my digital camera will be a primary feature in my future classroom. Pictures taken by my students as well as myself could be inserted in class newsletters and blog, bulletin boards, and lesson enrichment activities (as this geometry project was).

One of my "beefs" with using technology in the classroom is the time wasted when the technology tools experience glitches. It seems that often the computer connections are down, as it was in our class today, or as in my practicum classroom, the network connection is so slow the kids are bored before the exciting interactive site loads. Just as Jessica and I were ready to snap the first shot, the camera "shouted" that the memory card was full and the batteries were dead. So we spent our time going back to the classroom to get a new set of batteries and deleting existing photos on the camera. Using digital cameras in the classroom demands that these problems be avoided so the students will taste success rather than frustration. Again, technology can enhance the classroom experience if I challenge myself to be proficient and excited about it.