Photography in the Classroom

As an innovator in the classroom, I am continually attempting to educationally challenge my students while making learning fun and interesting at the same time. I think that the techniques discussed in this course will be incredibly useful in both goals.

First, I can see several important uses for Image Blender. In writing classes, I could have students capture a photo. Then, I could have another student write about that image. Perhaps they could describe it, tell what happens next, or even do a creative piece of writing on it. Beyond that, with Image Blender, the students could take that image a step further and alter the photo in order to write about it. In poetry courses, students might be assigned a piece of poetry that they would need to fit an image to. They could do this any way that they wanted to. Beyond this, in working with seniors on their graduation projects, there are many possibilities for integrating photos into the final presentation. As a whole the possibilities of Image Blender are tremendous.

Clay-mation movies offer so many possibilities in my classroom. First, in my writing classes, they are an easy way to help students learn how to write a script and tell a story. Students might be asked to write a creative story and then tell it using a clay-mation movie. Beyond that, I could see the possibility of teaching poetry terms through the movies. Each group could be assigned a different poetry term and they could have to explain, or demonstrate, the term using a clay-mation movie. In my Shakespeare class, students could be asked to perform a play, act, or scene from a Shakespeare play using only clay characters. All of these projects help to extend the learning of the units being taught.

Creating movies has the greatest potential in my classroom immediately. I have always had some sort of video production/play project incorporated into my 10th grade English classes. However, all of those presentations involved the students performing an extra act to a play and me videotaping. There was no post-production work done on the projects. With the addition of iMovies, students could write, direct, and produce their own video presentations. It would add a great deal of flexibility and creativity to the projects. They would really only be limited by their own imaginations. Students could do the entire videotaped segments outside of class, do the post-production work in the computer lab, and then show