Digital Pictures in my classroom

I am fascinated by the impact of technology on the classroom. Especially digital cameras.

Two interesting places I'm seeing their impact.

One:
Today I just finished marking a science project that my students do. I send them home with a package of science experiments to complete at home to explore the wonder of God's amazing world.

I've been teaching this unit for years, but this year's results were very different from what I've had in the past.

You see, I included in my assessment tool, which the students received before they started, the fact that they could earn extra credit if they included pictures of their experiments.

Since they had to submit their logbook of experiments digitally it was fairly trivial for them to upload pictures into the document.

I think that next time I would like to make the pictures mandatory. The quality of their reports was light years better because they had pictures and I gained a better sense of what they had done because of them.

Two:
I'm teaching students how to use microscopes right now.

In the past I taught them how to make field of view drawings and tried to get them to put in better pictures than this:


A couple of years ago one of my students took his iPod and did this:



So this year I told my students that instead of drawing them they could use their iPods if they wanted. I also gave them a tutorial video on how edit their pictures in GoogleApps so that they could add the labels we would need.

Not one student has opted to draw them by hand.

Here's why:

The wing of a fly taken with my iPhone 4 camera.