Monday, May 29, 2006

Students, Images and Courses

This fall we have three freshmen seminar courses where all students in each course, about 16, will be provided with free digital cameras. Right now, our "camera selection team" has settled on the Nikon Coolpix P2.

We are studying the best way for the students to share/distribute/present their images. A lot, of course, will depend on the faculty member's preferences. All we can do is provide choices, and be ready to support them.

There are free (or almost free) "social software" web-based solutions.

Blogger, example at http://omin.blogspot.com/
You could then create a podcast or RSS feed with feedburner

Or Flickr, and connect the two? You could also use Flickr by itself, without a blog.
Other choices are PowerPoint, WebCT image database (my team is shying away from this), Photoshop Web Photo Gallery (uploaded to WebCT).

There is also the wiki. I wrote up a tutorial for uploading images to a wiki we support
http://nutmeg.conncoll.edu/Theorizing_Race_Wiki/ (in Help)
but no students uploaded images. They were not required to, which may be one reason they didn't.

The students will use Photoshop Elements for editing the images, this is installed in all our computer labs and Keyserved.

The camera also can shoot short QuickTime movies, with audio, and there is an interesting debate on our team regarding how much this will be used.

1 comment:

Jean-Claude Bradley said...

I would suggest Flickr - they make good use of RSS feeds