Tip Tuesday: How Do My Students Deal With Photos?

My AP Statistics kids just turned in a project Friday that required them to screen capture some plots from their graphing calculator and embed them into the narrative of their paper. There's a couple ways to accomplish that:

TI-84, USB Cable, and TI Connect Software

TI-83, Camera Phone

The method using the TI Connect software is probably PREFERRED, and it makes for a more polished product, but in my school, and probably for most schools and many students, the graph and take a picture method below is more realistic.

I had a project come in late today because he hadn't had the pictures from his calculator on Friday. When asked him why he hadn't just emailed them to himself, he said,

"Well, I don't have a smartphone, so I don't have a way of getting them off of my phone."

Sound familiar? As long as I have been giving projects requiring students make videos or take pictures, I've heard the can't-get-them-off-my-phone excuse. It's valid-ish. Not everyone has a smartphone (nor should everyone). I don't, either. That's my touchscreen messaging phone I bought on Amazon for $.01 in the photo above. What this student didn't know, and I guess is lost knowledge when most people just have their personal email attached to their mobile device, is that you can email any account with a text message. It works just like sending a text message, except you enter an email address instead of the recipients' mobile numbers.

STEPS:

1.  Take the photo.
2.  Begin a new message.
3.  Enter your own (or someone else's email address in the "to:" field

emailaddress@domain.com

4.  Attach your photos (usually this says attach in the message menus) 
5.  Attach as many photos as you need! The next thing this student did to shock me today was he ended up sending like 6 different emails to himself, one for each pic.

I attached 3 pix to this message.

6.  Wait a few moments, open your email on a computer, and save/print the image files.

Classroom Use:

This was relevant to me most recently with these calculator screen captures, but I could see it being relevant for assignments on field trips, scavenger hunts around the school, photos accompanying reflective pieces in a lit/comp course, evidence for student learning portfolios, or relevant notes for interactive notebooks (to be glued into a physical notebook OR a physical artifact uploaded to a digital notebook).

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Extra bonus: 

There are several web-based photo editors for cleaning up the images once they come from the camera phones. Here are some I've used:

• PicMonkey (used on this blog and heybethbaker.wordpress.com)
• Pixlr (express or advanced) (used often for my master's portfolio, also a Chrome and Firefox extension)
• Aviary (Also a Chrome and Firefox extension)
• Inside Google+ photo viewer (from the makers of Picnik)