"Creativity is contagious, pass it on." ~Albert Einstein

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Camera App in Kindergarten

I have to give all the credit for this great idea to Kelly Smith, Instructional Technology Facilitator in Greenville, South Carolina!  Thanks, Kelly!

It all started when I saw this tweet from Kelly:



I was immediately intrigued by this activity as I love working with our Kindergarteners and their teachers on ways to use the iPad in their classrooms.  Yes, we cover some basic "parts of the iPad" and talk about what certain buttons do, how to four finger swipe, five finger pinch, close open apps, etc., but I never thought about building the foundation on the basics of the camera app. 

Man, I love the ideas shared on Twitter! I asked Kelly for some details about this activity and she shared what she does when introducing the camera app to her students. 

We use the camera app for a lot of different activities in Kindergarten.  I've never taught Kindergarteners how to utilize all of the tools within the camera app.  Until now!  Thanks to Kelly, we have spent some time showing our Kindergarteners how to do some of the following tasks, to better prepare them for some of the tasks we will be doing with the iPads throughout the year. 
  • Using the cropping tool.  The students loved using their math manipulatives along with a simple numbered card to take a picture, then cropping the image.   So simple, but the students loved it!
  • How to rotate photos.
  • How to use the zoom feature.
All this sounds pretty basic, but I actually created an App Task Challenge for the camera app to better educate my teachers on the various features within the app. Check it out here.  

I think we take the camera app for granted sometimes.  There are a lot of great features in this app that has so many uses in our classroom! 

Give this activity a try with your students.  I plan on building on it this week as we introduce the Pic Collage app.  Students will take a photo, edit it, then insert their edited image into a collage we will be creating. 








1 comment:

  1. Thanks for Sharing. I have already shared with my kindergarten teachers!

    ReplyDelete

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