Examples of Photo-sharing in Biology Class

I am amazed at the breadth and volume of technology in K-12 even. It does make me a little nervous to have so many little faces in full view to anyone….I even found myself being reluctant to include photos of my grown daughters in the tiny Flickr slide show I embedded (did it really work, properly? ) in our class wiki.

I pondered the various photo sharing activities in Terry Smith’s site (http://www.smithclass.org/) an found that I like the idea of project-based learning, and think that would be where I would begin photo sharing in my classroom.

For my Environmental Biology class this spring, my students worked on a several-week project called Sense of Place where they “adopted” a site and then made observations and connections to course content and presented this to the class. I wish I had required it to be more photo-heavy; I think I really missed an opportunity. I did have more than one student tell me they did not have a camera. What to do about that?

Other project-based projects could be along this same line: adopt-an-organism, -metabolic pathway, -organ system, -ecosystem, etc. I think it would be fun and very enlightening. Students would be required to include a certain proportion of their own photos and be careful to demonstrate their understanding of copyright and fair use guidelines. I have already considered this using a poster-making program, but haven’t tried that yet either! Maybe they could be combined.

One of my textbooks includes Google Earth links in each chapter. I like the idea of presenting slide shows/presentations using Google Earth, and want to become proficient in this. Recently, I am thinking more and more globally and want to project the importance of this for my students.

My two proposed photo-sharing activities are project-based adopt-a-something slide shows and instructor-generated Google Earth slide shows.