Educational Apps Part 3 – Photography

Being creative is one of the great strengths of the iPad. Taking the time to understand how the iPad can be used in creative and more open ended ways is important. All of the apps featured in this post can be used to encourage Blooms higher order thinking; analysing, evaluating and creating. The other thing that creative apps are often good at is sharing. Students can create work within the app and share it via uploading to the web or emailing the product. This opens up great potential to connect student learning with parents.

Fotobabble

 

 

 

 

 

Fotobabble is an easy to use app great for any age group from Reception to Yr 12. The basic premise is to take a photo, add some audio describing what the photo is about (analysing/evaluating). There are some other basic editing tools including enhancing the photo, applying some basic effects, some basic stickers, photo orientation, cropping, brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness, free hand drawing onto photo, Add text to photo, redeye, whiten and remove blemishes.

By creating an online account using your school email a username and a password you can share photos from the app directly to the account. This is almost instant. The photos can be uploaded as public or private and when you go to the account online you can get a link that you could share with others.

Ideas for Fotobabble include:

  • create a class online account to store student photos.
  • Share your students work with their parents. Email a link to parents so they can view their childs work.
  • Students take an image of an experiment in science and record audio over the top explaining the experiment and results. Text could be added to the photo i.e. the name of the experiment. Students could produce more than one photo which together showed a process with audio explanation.
  • Students could take a nature photo i.e. the mangroves or the beach. Students could explain the habitat and the types of animals that lived in that habitat.
  • Students could take a photo of a piece of art work and use audio to explain the process they had to go through to create the piece and what new skills they learnt along the way.
  • Students could take photos of a historical landmarks (locally or on an excursion). Using the audio function students could record information they have learnt about the place they visited.
  • JP students could take a photo of a math concept using counters or blocks i.e. patterning. They could then add audio explaining the concept in the photo.

WordFoto

 

 

 

 

 

 

This app allows you to take a photo then recreate the photo using a word set. Type up to 10 words in a word set and apply it to the photo. The photo is then recreated using just those words. The words are used in different shades and sizes to generate the picture. Students could take a photo of an object or person and generate a word list that describes that object. The type of words used will differ depending on what you might ask a student to do. For example simple descriptive words to describe the positive aspects of a person to more abstract terms that may link to a political image. Again this app could be used from Reception to Year 12. The photos can be emailed directly from the app or saved to the photo library on the iPad. When the iPad is plugged into a PC the photo can be copied from the photo library to the PC.

 

TiltShiftGen

 

 

 

 

 

Apply depth of field to your photos. Give a professional look to your iPhone/iPad photos by selecting what stays in focus and what doesn’t. This is is called depth of field and can normally only be achieved with an expensive SLR camera. Teaching students how to compose photos could be one application for this app or just to improve the quality of photos that we use for our newsletters and school magazine.