Use a camera in your classroom everyday!

Estimated reading time according to Read-O-Meter: 4m23s

CC-BY-SA-2.5 Nicolás García

Cameras continue to become increasingly ubiquitous in 21st century life.  They exist in a variety of forms and formats, but they can be found everywhere.  Traditional formats still exist in digital point-and-shoots and DSLRs, but cameras are much more present in our daily lives as a feature on tablets, MP3 players, portable video games and mobile phones.

So what?  Well as camera technology has infused our daily lives, so too should it be infusing your classroom on a daily basis!  Using cameras in the classroom is certainly not new, but with the emergence of cameras that are more accessible and services that make sharing or archiving simpler, I encourage you to reassess how often a camera is put to use in your classroom, and below you will find a few suggestions.

Archiving

If you have a tablet or phone with a camera, these items are probably never too far out of reach throughout the school day.  These ever-present cameras are extremely handy for archiving a variety of classroom items:  anchor charts, bulletin boards, your neatly organized classroom library, handouts from professional development, paper schedules, and student work done on paper to name only a few.

Pointing your camera at a piece of paper might feel unusual at first, but even the relatively low-quality camera on the back of an iPad 2 captures the details well enough to reference later.  Personally, I use my phone for this purpose.  The beauty of having documents (which were either created on paper or delivered only on paper) all “scanned” on my phone is that I always have access to them wherever I might be working.

Student Portfolios

Digital portfolios are becoming increasingly common, Evernote being one tool educators are using to have students freely and easily maintain a portfolio (or, explained in video).  If you are a 1:1 device classroom, the cameras on a tablet, laptop or Chromebook not only allow your students to snap a photograph of their paper work, but they also can sit in their device’s “photo booth” and record a video explaining their thinking or offering reflections.

Photography as Art

A camera in the hands of your students opens up an entirely different form of creative expression through photography.  In my own experience, I have found photography to be an excellent way for all students to become engaged in artistic expression and starting to consider elements of visual literacy.  Students, and people in general, tend to lump themselves into groups like, “I can’t draw” or, “I don’t sing.”  Hand them a camera though and teach them a few composition guidelines and suddenly you have 30 little Ansel Adams’ in your midst.  Here is some excellent photography work done by my students, which I generally teach as a unit in 2nd, 5th and 7th grades.

Family Connection

As teachers, we all have heard from parents that when they ask their child what they did at school today, they receive a vague response like, “Stuff” or, “Different things.”  Generally in the past teachers have been able to share classroom photographs by taking the time to connect a digital camera to a computer, transfer the photos, pick out the ones worth sharing, then upload them to a classroom webpage.

Enter ShutterCal.  ShutterCal is an online daily photo calendar and is one of many solutions to the time-consuming ways of the past.  It is totally free, although it does offer advanced privacy features for a small fee.  ShutterCal can be used from a computer, but the true time saver is if you have an iOS device in your classroom with the free ShutterCal app.  In less than a minute, you can easily share a daily photo to your ShutterCal calendar and have it automatically displayed on your classroom homepage as well – without ever touching a computer or taking out any cords.  If you are truly brilliant, like my colleague Katie Muhtaris, you could create a class job for a student to snap the daily photo and upload it from their iPad.

Things to Consider

If you have any intention of the photographs you snap of your students or of their work being shared beyond your classroom walls, be sure you are in compliance with school and district policies.  In my case, there are district policies in place and at our school we send home a media release form to every student at the beginning of the school year.  I keep a list handy of students whose families have declined consent or have not returned the form and I do not share any photographs or work of those students publicly online.

A Good Classroom Camera

Beyond the tablets or phones you or your students have in your classroom, a dedicated digital camera is still an excellent tool to have available.  I would like to explain all of this in more detail in a future post, but basically I believe a good classroom camera should be able to take decent photographs, record acceptable videos, and have macro photography capability.  Cost is always an issue, so one option I’d suggest is the Canon Powershot A1200 which fits all three points above and at the time of posting costs only $90.

Questions or suggestions on other classroom camera connections, please share them in the comments!  Now, go forth and photograph!