As more and more sites acquire digital cameras and scanners, teachers are discovering hundreds of ways to use them to facilitate outstanding learning. Visit the following projects created by PUSD teachers and feel free to adapt them for the learners in your classroom. Also take time to visit the links to Additional Sites with standards based science, math, social studies and language arts curriculum using digital cameras.

Back to School Perfect Paragraphs: 
Take photos of your students with a digital camera (or scan traditional photos) and use them in a Back to School PowerPoint. This project will teach your students to use PowerPoint, help you assess their writing skills, and give you the opportunity to prepare for Back To School night all at the same time. Students are asked to write three perfect paragraphs.  The first paragraph introduces the child's family and concludes with the child describing an award the family deserves. The second paragraph is where the child describes everything he or she likes to do.  Then, the concluding paragraph describes all the things the student would like to do someday.  You can have students type their writings, import their photos and then record them reading the slide to play for your Back To School night.  For a sample project, click on the computer above.

A wonderful 2/3 teacher at Sunset Hills, Monda Forrestal put a new twist on this project when she asked her students to write about: "What My Life Would be Like if I were Famous." She then had them dress in their best "Famous" attire, took digital photos and created a PowerPoint that was the hit of her back to school night.

Where I'll Be in 2023 Denise Hogan, amazing PUSD Tech Trainer developed this online task to help students think about what they wanted to be doing in the future. Students scanned photos and took digital photos to illustrate their projects on web pages and in PowerPoint presentations. Click here for the online project.  For a sample student web page, click here.

Renie Martin's Fourth Grade Class Tall Tale PowerPoints : Renie Martin, a fourth grade teacher at Canyon View used a digital camera and scanner to help her students create Tall Tale PowerPoints, which were then posted online. Students drew the scenes for their stories, which were scanned to use as backgrounds for their PowerPoints. Then, digital photos were taken of the students who posed for each scene, matching their backgrounds. (Hint: When taking the photos, pose your students against a solid colored background to make it easier to cut them out and place them in the scenes. We used Photoshop to do this. Contact one of the district tech trainers if you need access to Photoshop.)

Language Arts Author Study Project:
Have your students present a PowerPoint biography of an author's life.  Scan photos or copy them from the web for a powerful presentation.  These third grade boys actually found a photo of E.B. White's first draft of the first page of Charlotte's Web and included it in their PowerPoint.  Click on their photo to see a sample slide show.  If any slide has a lot of extra space on it, click on it with your mouse and more text and photos will "fly" in for you.  (Third graders will use a lot of animations and sounds the first few times they use PowerPoint!)

FACT- LINK PROJECTS 
(This project utilizes photos scanned from magazines and books as well as digital photos taken by the students.) Launch your students on real world research journeys to investigate issues or factual information in fictional books.  Discerning fact from fiction builds excellent reasoning and research skills as your students work to complete these projects.  Their writing skills will also improve as they organize and present their research data to their peers.  One sample project would be to have students reading Charlotte's Web complete research to discover what information provided about spiders in the book is fact and what is fiction?  One group of students decided to investigate all the information Charlotte presented to Wilbur and discover if it could be verified in factual spider research works.  They presented their findings in a Spider Slide Show.  Click on the spider above to link to their project. (AIMS Magazine, volume XIV, January, 2000 has published a "Spider Spoofs and Proofs" project that would complement this one tremendously!)

Additional Sites:

Tech4Learning: Visit Tech4Learning's web site to find useful standards based lesson plans for using a digital camera to teach science, language arts, math, and social studies. (K-8)

1001 Uses for a Digital Camera The University of Central Florida has created a database of standards based lessons using digital cameras. They focus on seven different categories: Schoolwide, English, Mathematics, Science, Social Studies, Foreign Language, and Art.

Ron Kubota of Mililani High School has captured several examples of the use of digital cameras for learning. Check out the following sample projects:
Science at Home Series: Catching Live Cockroaches
A Study Trip to Maui (capturing the events of a class field trip)
How to Propagate Desert Rose from a Seed
A Day at the Bishop Museum (includes a short video clip using the video function of the Sony Mavica camera we use at most sites.)
His site also includes an introductory course of tips and tricks for understanding and using digital cameras. Click here for his site.