Digital Cameras for Teachers
Classroom Ideas
Middle school classroom ideas
- If you can only afford one camera, you might take a look at the Sony Mavica with rewritable CD or DVDs. This way teachers and students can have their own photo disk.
- Purchase inexpensive cameras for student use and more expensive cameras for teachers. That way, students have the experience of taking pictures, but you make sure you get good pictures of important events!
- Photoshop Elements, which runs on both Macs and Windows, is worth taking a look at. Have at least one computer set up with Elements that is accessible for both students and teachers.
- Let students work with the images, cropping, editing, and so on. Students need to learn how to optimize images for the Web and get images down to a useable size.
- Consider online printing in order to save money, or if you want your prints in a hurry, you can try the photo printing kiosks at Walmart and other stores.
"Just Jump In!"
The best way to get started using digital cameras is to just do it! So you make mistakes and waste some time--but that's how we learn. If you can't figure something out, give it to one of your students!
Ideas for using your digital camera in the classroom:
- Photograph students dressed up as what they want to be when they grow up and use the pictures to illustrate career reports.
- Take lots of pictures while on a class field trip. Have students write a caption for each picture, post the photos and captions to a Web site to create a virtual field trip.
- Photograph a "day in the life of your classroom" for parent Open House. Create a slide show (you can use Microsoft's free Photo Story software) to run as parents tour your classroom.
- Store a photograph with each student's electronic portfolio.
- Assign pairs of students to walk through the school to find such examples of geometric shapes as circles, triangles, parallel lines, obtuse angles, and so on. Label each photo and create a geometry book.
- Photograph community landmarks and have students create a brochure about your community.
- Use photographs to illustrate the process for complicated projects or for science experiments.
- Write a class novel and illustrate it with live-action photos of your students.
- Take pictures of class procedures and display them in the classroom as a reminder.
- Create a seating chart with photographs for substitutes.
- Take pictures of each child's eyes, nose, feet, or mouth only. Have children try to match each student to his or her body part.
- Document the growth of classroom plants or animals with daily or weekly photos.
- Take photos of school staff performing their duties. Write a caption for each photo and create a Community Workers book.
- Snap a black-and-white headshot of each student, size it to ? page, and place a box frame around it. Place a blank box the same size as the framed picture beside it. Have students draw ?-inch to 1-inch gridlines in pencil in both boxes and label the gridlines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on in each direction. Then have students try to duplicate their pictures by drawing only what they see in each grid.
- Take a photograph of each student at the beginning and end of the school year. Have students complete Venn diagrams of themselves, showing how they have -- and haven't -- changed during the year.
- Compile a set of file cards naming such abstract concepts or emotions as freedom, love, hate, honor, joy, sorrow, patriotism, responsibility, and respect. Have students select a card at random and take a photograph illustrating that concept.
- Have each student choose a letter and find an object that begins with that letter. Take a picture of the child with the object and use the pictures to create a class alphabet chart.
- Arrange students into groups and assign each group one of the five senses. Have each group photograph the appropriate sensory organ and then have them take pictures of objects that organ might best perceive.
- Take pictures to illustrate such science concepts as food chain, biodiversity, biome, and so on.
- Have students go on a photographic scavenger hunt, taking pictures of the objects they find rather than retrieving the objects themselves.
- Take pictures of plants or animals in your community and use them to create a field guide of local wildlife.
Digital Cameras for Teachers
EOU Malheur County Center (541) 889-7468 or (541) 889-6222
