First Impressions: Scavenger Hunt & Web Albums

During the past week and a half, our class has experimented with digital scavenger hunts in order to create a Picasa Web album and a Google Presentation to showcase our resulting images.

1) What went well or not well?
The scavenger hunt portion of the assignment was very enjoyable and allowed us, as students, a break from sitting in the classroom. Uploading the images to our computers afterward was also easy, and Picasa Web and Google Presentations were generally easy and mostly intuitive to use, especially if you have had experience with other programs like MS PowerPoint.

One thing that didn't go well was the embedding process for both slideshows. For each application, the directions given in class weren't clear enough about how to find the embedding code, and it took a lot of poking around and some help from another student in order to do it successfully. I can see this being a pitfall for classroom use because the embedding code does not come up under the "share" button on Google Presentations, which is the place I thought to look.

2) How will you use this tool in your professional practice and/or instruction with students?
Among the different tasks/applications in this assignment, I am most likely to use Google Presentations with my future students. While I will have access to MS PowerPoint and will likely use it to create my own presentations for use in class, I cannot assume that all students will have access to the same or a similar program. Because Google Presentations is free and can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection, it can provide a great alternative to purchased programs like MS Office Suite that students may not have at home. It is also a program that everyone can pull up and work on together in a school computer lab.

While I can see some of the benefits of using digital scavenger hunts or Picasa Web albums for certain assignments, I don't expect to use them frequently (if at all) in my classroom. Though the scavenger hunt was fun and allowed a break from our regular classroom activities, I didn't find much learning value in it. The same held true for Picasa Web albums. While there may be opportunities for students to create and present slideshows of images, most assignments I can envision would be a combination of images and text, which would be better served through use of MS PowerPoint or Google Presentations.

3) What will you do differently next time?
If I were to complete this assignment again, I would want our group to take more time and care when taking photos during the digital scavenger hunt. Even though most of our images came out reasonably well, some were blurry, either due to hand movement during the shot or not focusing the image correctly before taking it. When we got back to the computer lab and uploaded the images, we were disappointed to find that some of them were not usable.