Scanning photographs

The children explored the prints of the photographs they had taken at home, discussed them with their talk partners and presented their favourite image to the whole class. The next stage was to scan the photographs to make a digital image which could be manipulated on the computer screen.

The process diagram was very useful in supporting the children going through the correct sequence and developing skills such as cropping and resizing the image, saving and naming it appropriately and making sure it was saved in the right place so it could be found easily later on. File management is extremely important in a project like this as it is very easy to lose files! The sooner children develop an understanding of file management and are able to manage their own folders, the quicker they are able to become efficient and autonomous and therefore move on to learning higher order skills. It is common to be able to observe a lot of peer to peer support and learning in this computer workshop context particularly when children work in pairs.

Children worked on the image full size on the screen. To finish their postcard images they added a text caption and then using the tile tool created four identical smaller images. When printed out on A4 paper the four images were appropriately postcard size (A6) and could be cut up, thus producing an edition of four cards.

I think it was really successful, the images and the texts were fantastic, and they also had some basic design skills to think about, like 'do I want the text the same colour as the background of the photograph, because then the text wouldn't show up?' or positioning the text so it didn't interfere with the image. (Laurie Long)