Northwest

Yesterday on Twitter, I read a New Years Resolution/ Challenge between two bloggers.  Their challenge was to take one good photo every day.  Well, this being January 2, I have already missed out on this challenge.  But it did get me thinking about ideas and implications for my classroom.  What if I challenged myself to take one photo a day to add to our daily blog?  I often do take photos and include them in our blog, but what if I challenged myself to try to think of a summarizing picture of the day?  This would force me to look at my teaching and the learning each day with new eyes.  Each day I would be reflecting on the unique learning moments that happened throughout the day.  This reminded of me of when I was teaching abroad and keeping a journal.  (Before blogs.)  I would often do things that I might not have done if I hadn’t been looking for a good journal entry.  Swimming with penguins, flying into Somalia on a UN Cargo jet and eating cui are far more interesting than the hum drum of daily life.  What if I looked at the learning in my classroom in the same way?  Not that my classroom should be a 3 ring circus, but that learning should be invigorating, engaging and challenging.  I could even set goals for myself, like, today, I am going to take a photo of students who are engaged or students who are making connections, etc.   

I then thought further, what if I challenged my students to be involved in the process.  Perhaps, one day a week we would look at the photos and as a class pick one photo that best represents our learning that week.  This could lead to a writing activity.  Or perhaps I could challenge my students to take a few minutes at the end of each day to reflect on their day by drawing a summarizing picture.  Students could create a visual journal to share their learning. I like the idea of focusing on new learning with this activity.  But you could also have students select one photo from the news each day, reflect on that and add that to a time line.

So many ideas.  Do you have more to share?  Would love to hear your comments.

As I was contemplating this idea, I thought of a few applications that could be used with this picture a day idea.

OurStory.com is a collaborative timeline project.  Students could add photos and text each day to create a class timeline of the year.

VoiceThread is another great application for sharing ideas with words and pictures.  Several students could comment on one picture.

Blurb.com whether you collect your photos in a blog, a timeline, VoiceThread or other, you can compile your year in photos into a bound, library quality book!