January 2008 — 21st-Century Classroom
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They Get the Picture
Students' familiarity with digital cameras is allowing teachers to augment classroom instruction with a myriad of unconventional activities.
DIGITAL CAMERAS AREN'T just for taking pictures of friends and family anymore. Today's classrooms use them for a spate of projects, and not merely in photography classes—instructors are incorporating digital cameras into every subject and every aspect of instruction.
Witness how Springfield Township School District in Oreland, PA, is utilizing digital cameras for more than fine arts. As a recipient of a Pennsylvania Classrooms for the Future grant, the district has outfitted select classrooms at Springfield Township High School with resources including laptops, digital still cameras, video cameras, webcams, speakers, interactive whiteboards, and projection units.
English teacher and CFF technology coach Ken Rodoff says digital photography is enabling students to learn in a way that is native to them, one that is more visually oriented. One sample use, he offers, is a whole new way to learn vocabulary words. He says the students in his English classes are able to visualize new words and concepts through images they post online: "The word plethora, for instance. Students can go out, take a picture that they feel is a visual representation of that word, and then upload it to [social networking site] Flickr. Then other students can annotate the image to expand the meaning."
IMAGE CONSCIOUS
Springfifield Township
students posted this visual
depiction of
the word
concord, meaning harmony.
Rodoff explains that once students' photos are uploaded onto the site, educational opportunities are opened up. "When students post their images to Flickr, they can never post them and leave them alone," he says. "The teacher asks questions about the images and how they represent what they are intended to represent. Teachers are now affording themselves an opportunity to use those images as a springboard into lessons."
Digital cameras also are being used to complement students' social networking activities while at the same time helping them study literary works. "Now suddenly, my students are getting a deeper understanding of Hamlet as they are working on their blogs, and they want to get images to include with their interpretation of the story," Rodoff says.
Indeed, social networking has been the main catalyst for students' use of digital photography. Sites such as Flickr, MySpace, and Facebook integrate photos into their overall experience, and the decreasing cost of digital cameras and the ubiquity of camera phones have made the technology almost second nature to today's students. This, many educators note, has made using digital cameras in the classroom a more comfortable learning experience.
