How Are You Using Photos in Your Classroom?

Ohio Fall / Phil and Jo Schiffbauer / CC BY 3.0

What story could your students tell about these photos? There is an actual story; but that doesn't matter. What story could your students write?

Or what mathematics problems could they devise for these photos?

What science is illustrated in the photos?

After you and your students take a field trip they could create a collage like this and use it in their discussion of what they learned.

Perhaps, after a lesson your students could take pictures to illustrate what they learned and create collages to post in the classroom as reminders of what they know now.

Collages are very easy to create with PicMonkey, a free website that you can use for online photo-editing. (A paid premium membership is also available, but you can do a lot with the free version.)

• PicMonkey
• http://www.picmonkey.com/

• Tutorial: Make a Photo Collage
• http://blog.picmonkey.com/2012/10/16/learn-collage-before-another-butterfly-dies/

• All PicMonkey tutorials are available at...
• http://blog.picmonkey.com/category/tutorials/

Hmm... Perhaps, the way to scale up this activity is to use augmented reality with it.

By the way, this blog post began because I was looking for a way to manipulate photos that I have taken (rather than using someone else's photos). I thought I was going to use a website that I have used in the past. That website truly does some fun manipulations with photos. It used to do it for free. But not now. I have no problem with folks getting paid for their work, but I was looking for something free. So, then, I returned to exploring.

A reference to Picnik brought back good memories, but Picnik is no longer available as a standalone site. PicMonkey, however, has been doing a good job as its successor in online photo-editing. I use collages personally to capture events and to share them. The next step was obvious. Think about using collages in the classroom.

Of course, using photos at school includes using them in blogs and other multimedia reports. The collages don't have to have as many photos as the one I used in the blog. They can serve the purpose of a blog post or multimedia report with just a few photos.

So, I shall start using PicMonkey collages for teaching and learning in addition to using them for personal sharing. And next... I need to play with augmented reality!

How do you use photos in your classroom?