Teaching with Photography

I am so excited about my latest school project!

Our school on the Space Coast of Florida has issued a challenge to middle grade schools in six other countries:

Show us YOUR WORLD!
As a social studies class project, my school will host 4 photo galleries for students to submit pictures from their country. Let’s learn together visually about life in your country.

The Participants this round:	United States (contest host)
Singapore	Australia
Germany	France
Israel	Mexico

There are four categories:
Food Picture Gallery: What food or beverages do you regularly eat that you think might be different from other countries?
Traditions Picture Gallery: What Cultural/Religious/Historical traditions do you participate in that might be unique to your country?
Home Life Picture Gallery: Do you think that your living accommodations or decor may be different from other countries?
School Picture Gallery What does your classroom and school day look like? Is it different from mine?
We will be hosting this project on our school’s Studywiz server. Each student from each country can post one picture in each category. We will rely on Exif information and honor code to insure the pictures were taken by the students during the contest period (the first three weeks of April). Teachers will monitor submissions from their students using RSS feed aggregation.

After the three week submission period, we will lock the students from further submissions and open up a five star rating, commenting and tagging system. Teachers will promote up to five pictures in each category to a new gallery that only the sponsoring teachers can submit their student’s pictures to. These will be our Photographic Best Gallery (PBG).

The Photographic Best Galleries will be judged and commented on for photographic skills and composition, and the general student school galleries will be rated for social/cultural interest and comments should be more of a conversation about cultures.

Students can ask the photographer and other students questions for clarification or more information. This will be where social networking skills (tagging, commenting), and some of the Technology Literacy goals regarding communication and ethical exchanges will take place. 

All photos will be available for viewing all through the month of May and may also be downloaded under Creative Commons Licensing.

Doesn’t this sound fun?

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