Since we don't have any student laptops yet to use in class, today we used the SMART Board to take a look at photos taken during the last class. Students made judgments about the quality of the shots based on focus, angle, framing and whether they could be used or not in a yearbook. Many were deleted for being blurry, but most students decided that parts of the other photos could be salvaged by rotating or cropping. The students also decided that very few of the photos could be used as is. Taking turns, the students went to the board and using the touch features, they chose photos to edit. I gave a quick demo of the cropping tool in Gimp and many of the students used the SMART Board to crop a photo in front of the class. Although they were doing the cropping, the other students had input and became fairly good judges of headroom and deletion of wasted space. At least this way everyone will have a good idea how to crop when we do get computers.
I know there is controversy about the value of the IWBs (interactive white boards) right now, but today it served us well.
