Photo Editing

Uses in the Classroom: Photo editing can be a great resource for teaching mathematics topics including transformations. Teachers can edit photos to show reflections, rotations, translation and scaling. At introductory stages a discussion can simply center at how the images have changed including identifying mathematical and nonmathematical changes. For example, students can notice that  the face in the third photo is bigger or scaled by by a number bigger than 1. In higher grades, the pictures can be put on a grid paper and students can be prompted to find exact answers to questions on transformations. Tessellation of student faces can also be a fun and cognitively engaging activity.

Photo editing is also a great tool for culturally relevant pedagogy. Students can take photos of their cultural artifacts and teachers can put the photos together into themes that align with different math units. Additionally,  teachers can take up the opportunity to discuss social justice issues including the implications of the tendency to scale women's photos or make the skin color of African Americans lighter.
Using photo editing as described here can improve learning by making your classrooms to be about your present students and their lives, thereby making your classroom relevant to them.

GIF

Photoshop GIF

Classroom use: With this gif, I want students to focus on identifying patterns as they count groups of objects. The animation blocks students from singly counting the dots and answers in the pictures reminds students that the focus is not the answer but how to get there. Students will discuss how best to count or the patterns that they have identified.  Students will then extend the pattern and draw the next stage. Older students should be able to determine the number of dots at 100th stage. The following gif can be used as an example of a very useful pattern when working with bigger numbers and can be shown as the lesson concludes. This activity involves identifying patterns and making inferences both of which are high level cognitive skills.

Issues to Consider:  Photoshop is not very user friendly and may be expensive but there are a lot of options that teachers can use such as https://pixlr.com and gimp . To be able to upload photos from photoshop to Pixlr, I needed to reduce the quality to zero so it might be better to edit and make a collage using the same host.

Copyright:  These are photos of my daughter and I,  taken by me. I edited them in photoshop and the collage was made using https://pixlr.com. I used photoshop, microsoft word, and http://www.gifpal.com to create these animated images.