Reading Reflections/GIMP

"When students take [digital] pictures and actively use them for purposeful knowledge, you have a dynamic combination for engagement and active learning." -R. McNear

Students love taking pictures as much as they love being in them. While most students aren’t aware of the different types of graphics, they can understand how it’s much more convenient to save pictures onto a disk which can be popped into a disk drive and transferred to a computer right away, as opposed to taking pictures with a regular camera, sending film to be developed, getting the pictures back, and then discovering that half of the pictures they took weren’t usable. They also realize that they have saved the trouble of scanning, saving, and doing a lot of editing of photos, since this is all done on the camera itself. They also learn that pictures can be easily viewed on a screen or Smart Board, or emailed as attachments.

Using digital photography helps the student become more involved in the classroom. The process becomes a cognitive one as the students reason and plan what pictures to take and why those pictures are needed. Random snapshots are okay sometimes, but the students quickly learn to be selective when using the camera. However, for us as teachers, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by new technologies and terminologies; but more significantly, it is more important to feel comfortable with the techniques used to enhance teaching and learning through photography than to understand all the settings on a camera.

On another note, I have found GIMP to be an extremely powerful image editor. with layer and vast range of graphic format support, over 100 built-in special effects, image coverting, all the basic tools like cropping, rotate/flip, pencil, brush, etc. to more professional tools like magic wand, blur/sharp and much much more. And that's just the start - buried deeply in this applications menu and floating tool bars is a dozen of expert sets of configuration tools to fix/retouch even the best of all images. It can make professional looking 3D images or animations in just minutes under a master users hand. GIMP is truly a powerful imaging program amongest Photoshop and other heavily priced products.

The only thing complaint about this application that I am able to forsee is that it's not aimed for the average computer user who may find this program somewhat difficult to use due to the lack of friendly interface, too advanced/complex features and absence of a built-in tutorial or help files. Otherwise, I am very glad to have discovered this program!