Digital tool: Digital camera

When most people think digital camera and young children they immediately think "catastrophe". But it is rarely the case, particularly if precautions are taken.

Harriet Price noted in her book "the really useful book of ICT in the early years" that staff were concerned that children might: Drop cameras; damage them with sand, water or messy play resources; or not be able to operate the camera. Harriet later reveled that none of these things happened and that a "parent" was the only person who dropped a camera.

Digital cameras are a fantastic way to enhance childrens' self esteem and independence. The children are thrilled and excited taking and looking at their pictures (even if they are lopsided) and it allows them a sense of "ownership" in their work.

As the adage goes "A picture tells a thousand words". Each individual who views a picture sees it from a different perspective. For example a picture of a weed may look like a "pretty flower" to a child but a "weed" to an adult. Images allow the teachers to get a better view of the perspective of their students. In general multimodel learning has been shown to be more effective than traditional, unimodal learning. Adding visual learning can result in significant gains in basic and higher order thinking.

In order to ensure that accidents with digital cameras are kept to a minimum it is best to insist that all students wear a neckband which the camera is tethered to. It is also possible to buy cheaper cameras for children which have "simple" features and large buttons. There are two examples below one is a "cars" digital camera and the other a "crayola" digital video camera.

As with digital sound, digital pictures can be inserted into a variety of ICTs including blogging.

Reference
Price. H. (2009) The really useful book of ICT in the early years. Milton Park, Great Briton: Routledge.

Stanton,D.; Neale,H.; Cobb, S.; Bayon,S.; Ingram,R.; Benford,S.; O Malley,C.; Wilson, J. (2000) Designing Storytelling Technologies to Encourage Collaboration Between Young Children. Paper accepted to CHI-2000, the Hague, the Netherlands,
1-6 April 2000.