February 2005 — Features
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Increasing Visual Literacy Skills With Digital Imagery
Student Use of Digital Cameras
Once students have successfully imported digital images into their work,
we take their digital skills to another level by requiring them to edit digital photos and combine them into one image (see example). We pair up the students, distribute one camera to each pair, and send them outside to take photos. When they return with a disk full of pictures, we show them how to use programs such as Photoshop to combine their images, or the images they have downloaded from the Internet, into creative images.
While students generally enjoy the assignment, we make sure to discuss the ethical aspects of digital imagery, such as the importance of giving credit for an image’s source. We also discuss how reality can easily be twisted or distorted through the use of digital imagery, and identify situations where editing of photographs is clearly unethical.
Among the supplemental resources we provide to our students are the two Web sites found at the end of this article. In addition, an article detailing how students as young as kindergarten effectively use digital cameras is among the course readings (Pastor, Kerns and Reddy 1997).
A growing number of ASU West teachers are incorporating digital cameras into their courses. In Course C'E 315 (Child and Adolescent Development), students take digital pictures of their final semester group project and place photos of the project into their electronic portfolios. A teacher in one of our reading methods courses also likes to capture activities in her classroom. The teacher checks out five cameras that she distributes to her students so they can photograph the proceedings, or as she puts it to her students, “Who wants to be the paparazzi today?”
Selecting the Cameras
As you can see, students can use digital cameras in many ways. However, no matter what the creative potential, technology needs to be as accessible and easy to use as possible or teachers won’t use it. Picking a camera to meet your needs is the most critical aspect of creating a classroom set of digital cameras. If at all possible, purchase a full set of the same model, because it is more efficient than giving students more than one set of instructions for a variety of camera models. Also, as you begin to look at models and prices, you need to consider how many cameras are needed to meet your instructional goals. Our C'E 313 classes tend to have about 30 students per section, so we ordered 15 cameras, figuring many activities could be done in cooperative groups.
When we purchased these cameras in the spring of the 2002-2003 school year, we chose the Sony Mavica MVC-FD200 model for many reasons, including its:
