Digital Images

Here's what I published today in our OCDSB Technology Times

Are you, and your students, looking for ways to integrate all those great holiday pictures into narratives, timelines and digital stories? Are you wondering how to capture some of the energy and motivations that some of your students may have experienced upon receiving new family entertainment consoles, digital cameras or smart phones?

Why not incorporate digital images into Bitstrips for Schools or Comic Life. Students who have taken pictures over the holidays can upload them to Flickr or transfer them to a memory stick, and import into these school-accessible applications. Students who don’t have images can use the school digital camera to take pictures around the school to be used as backgrounds or props. Teachers can create image folders on the shared media drive for all students. Keep file sizes small, 150MB is the limit!

Students can create a “silent movie” in Bitstrips, using avatars, imported digital backgrounds and no dialogue. Working in groups, students can progressively insert dialogue, inferring meaning from previous panels and predicting progressions. Or teachers can prepare several comic strip “starters” using an interesting background image, and have groups create a narrative in the next panels. Bitstrips now features a Flickr search, as well as search for images stored in your account. If you upload to your Flickr account, students can navigate to that folder.