Using pictures in class

Picture from a Picasa album projected from a laptop (foreground) on to the whiteboard

I liked an idea Jamie Keddie demonstrated at a teacher development workshop here at IH Barcelona the other day.

Using a laptop and projector, Jamie accessed his Picasa photo album and used images in it for a variety of classroom activities. One fun thing he showed us was how easy it is to crop images in Picasa, show only half of the picture and get learners to predict what they think is happening.

Of course, if you wanted to get hi-tech, with an interactive whiteboard, you could cut out the cropping part, and just access images on a USB drive, using a mask to hide or reveal as much as you wanted.

You also need to spend time actually finding the images that are going to work like that. Hating to spend time trawling the Web for things, personally I like a no-tech solution: one of the freebie newspapers we have in Barcelona is ADN. Check it out, if you can -- there is a great picture nearly every day on page 2 which is often the makings of a class.

Granted, projected on to a large whiteboard, Jamie's images (see example, above) looked more impressive than something torn from the morning's paper...