Three Good Ways to Use All Those Pictures
Take a look at your phone and you’re likely to find hundreds or thousands of pictures and videos (heck, there are more pictures of my daughters’ first weeks as infants than of my entire childhood). Now take that number and triple it and you’re getting close to the amount of pictures the average middle school and high school students have taken.
As teachers we should put these picture-taking and video-taking habits to good use. Here are three ways to utilize students’ picture-taking habits for classroom use.
Create a b-roll gallery.
Rather than making students scour the web in a quest for public domain or Creative Commons media, let them search in a classroom gallery of media. Create a shared Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox folder to which students can upload images and videos that will allow other students use in slideshows and other multimedia projects. In this video I demonstrate how to make b-roll galleries with your students.
Create digital portfolios of physical work.
Have students snap pictures of work they have done on paper or another physical medium and upload them to a folder that is shared with you. Of course, students can also link to digital projects. Seesaw, Spaces, and Google Sites are great platforms for projects like this.
Tell a visual story.
Are you trying to get students to tell stories about themselves? In that case, let them use photos to tell that story.
Did your class go on a field trip? If so, your students probably have a slew of photos from it. Have them use those to summarize the highlights of what they learned during the field trip.
Canva and Adobe Express are excellent options for making simple websites to tell a story. Here’s a demo of how to do that in Canva and here’s a demo of how to do that in Adobe Express.
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