Thing 13

This was fun!! I could definitely see students taking an interest in this kind of creative outlet. It's so much better than having to manually draw a magazine cover or a movie poster. I see potential with these website applications. I like bighugelabs better than dumpr in terms of potential classroom uses.

I've done multigenre papers in the past, and one of the requirements is some kind of cover to put everything together. Students could use photos in multiple ways to bring their particular subject to life. It might inspire kids to do good work on their projects. I've learned from other teachers, that while of course you need restrictions for safety purposes, sometimes it's better to let kids loose and have them choose a creative outlet that they're more comfortable with. Using photo sites could be an option.

The best part is that it gives students creative ownership of their work. They can publish it to the world, and may receive positive feedback.

I'm not sure of how photos would function in a math/science room...One idea that comes to mind is that at my school we have an Environmental Science class. In the fall and spring the teacher takes the kids outside to explore the high school's campus. The kids could take photos instead of notes and then do a report on what they've found that way, or create graphs using photos of their findings over a few weeks. The teacher could create a classroom group on flickr where the students will be required to store their photos. They could also upload photos to their personal network drives. The problem would be sharing digital cameras, but because we do have that digital photography class, it might work.

http://bighugelabs.com/