Tuesday, March 11, 2008

On-Line Resources

http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/lessons/

You just never know what you will find on-line until you really start looking! The above website is a great resource for teachers of all grade levels that are trying to incorporate digital photography into their classrooms. On the left navigation bar you will find links to introductory sites on using digital photography, video, and storytelling. On the main page it has lots of great lesson plans. (Some of the lessons for the upper grades would even be useful to me for learning new elements of the program, because it goes step by step...awesome for teacher reference). The site is maintained by Adobe, who manufactures the program Photoshop Elements. I have the program on my home computer and it is fantastic for editing and doing fun things to your photos, but we don't have the program at school. However, I found that I could still use many of the IDEAS from the lessons without having the program. :-) For example, there was a lesson for first graders using the paint portion of the program to illustrate Dolch word list sentences. I could do the same thing using MS Paint which IS on my computer. I was a little disappointed, though, because the lesson did not have the students out there taking photos...but that would be easy enough to fix as well. Students could be given a Dolch word and asked to think of a sentence relating that word to something in the classroom that he/she could take a photo of. For example:

We
ate big pancakes at our party.



I hope this can help you get some ideas on using digital photography in YOUR classroom!
Happy snapping!

Sabrina :-)

4 comments:

Jenn Swaisgood said...

Great resource Sabrina! I really love the lesson plan link. One on-going battle in my school is how vocabulary is taught (isolation vs. in context). I'm the black sheep of the bunch who strongly believes that it should be taught in context. However, I'm always looking for fun ways to spice it up a little bit. The "Visual Dictionary" lesson plan is FANTASTIC! I'm going to try it next week! Thank you for the great resource!

I also really like your idea of using pictures with the word list. It actually is along the same lines as the vocabulary idea, just at a lower level. If you try it out, please let me know how it goes.

abaralt said...

Sabrina,
I know I'm not officially in your group, but I also love photography. I was very fortunate to have been able to purchase a class set of digital cameras for my computer lab this year, so I'm always looking for ideas. I hope to check your blog from time to time for new resources.

Annette said...

Hi Sabrina, I have found that the website link you suggested is a great place for resources. It really gives some eye-opening ideas for using the camera in the classroom.

We actually did a vocabulary training today and discussed a lot about teaching vocabulary explicitly and in context. It gave great ideas to discuss examples of vocabulary as well as non-examples. For instance, ocean non-examples could be rivers, lakes, and streams. Okay, I'm off on a tangent! :)
Annette

Jacob Coon said...

Thanks for the link Sabrina. Just like Anna, I am also not in your group, but am interested in photography. Have you looked into finding grant listings so teachers can get cameras for their school. My school does not even have cameras which is why I have not been able to incorporate them as of yet. Let me know if you find any.