Post - the Tenth!

The Use of Digital Cameras in Science

I have now decided that the digital camera is a God send to the classroom. In particular I have found it particularly useful in teaching science.

We carried out an experiment to see which materials will keep an ice cube cold for the longest. To do this we had to wrap ice cubes in various materials and then look at them every 15 minutes to see how much smaller the ice cubes get. But how to get thirty year four children to measure and observe the ice cubes properly? I therefore decided to take photos of each experiment at different stages in order for them to be able to look back over the experiment and write up their observations from a visual source. It also meant that during the experiment the pupils had to do no writing! Always a happy result for a class full of eight and nine year olds!

Because the class were in groups each investigating a different material, it also meant that I could display the photos onto the interactive white board so that all the class could compare and contrast the different materials.

I have to say though that it would have been nice to allow the pupils to take their own photographs. However, with one camera per class this is not very practical so it was quicker and more feasable to do it myself.

I have also used the filming function on the camera to support the less able writers. The science assessment task was to design a fair test for an experiment involving thermal insulators. Rather than getting the less able writers to record their ideas by writing I interviewed them to assess their ideas. This was really motivating for them and they really showed some good scientific knowledge that they would have otherwise been unable to communicate.