Thing 26 Media Skills
I was not sure where to start with this project so I first looked at “9 Ways Classroom Photos Can Create Student Connection”
Your smartphone may be the secret to classroom community (selfie stick optional).
By Jenn Horton on May 22, 2018
I liked her ideas about having students contribute images of themselves to a spot in the library. She changes up the manner in which she displays the student’s photos. She has walls, doors and windows. It is important that we as educators make a connection with our students. I think I will use from Horton’s article is to create a “Mission Wall” where students post their picture, a title that is an attribute about themselves and a quote or mission. I currently have lots of student’s artwork all over my library including the ones they create and just tape on our circulation counter or sometimes on our computers. I want to start the next school year off with this Mission wall to make my students feel included and important. The second thing I do occasionally during our staff vs. student book contest is to hang pictures of both staff and students reading. However I want to extend the reading pictures from the start of the school year instead of just from our book contest.
I used Collage Maker BeFunky for pictures from the faculty for our staff vs. student reading contest.
Picting, not Writing, is the Literacy of Today’s Youth Is a picture really worth 1,000 words?
By Cathie Norris, Elliot Soloway 05/08/17
This viewpoint by Norris does raise some valuable concerns about how our students are communicating in the real world. The usage of Snapchat is people communicating not by texting or email but simply through pictures. According to Norris students are telling a story by using Snapchat or other similar programs.
I think she has a valid point about communicating to others. I took a moment to look at the texts on my phone and they are not all in words. I have pictures, videos and memes that I have both sent and received without any words. So we do tell stories through our own pictures. So I am going to think more about the “Picture Literacy.” Pictures can also be a jumping point for writing especially when they are relevant to the students. I’m not going all in on just pictures as a form of literacy but just as another form learning.
I love Collage Maker BeFunky because it doesn’t cut off my images like when I send my collages to Walmart. BeFunky allows saving into drive and also the option to download. I tried it with some pretty pictures I had.
Students will be able to create collages with their own pictures for fun. Once they are hooked on the coolness of it I am hoping they will use it to create visual presentations for projects. This will be a great lesson to teach about what images can be used from the Internet so students will be able to use the Public Domain Images and Music in my Follett Collection
Media skills can be challenging when the programs that I wanted to use worked fine until the pay for this eventually showed up. But I use free versions for many projects and they seem to work fine. Collage Maker allows text and styles so it is useful for my students and myself. It also saves to Google Drive and downloads the collages.