Blog 18- Using Google Photos for teaching and learning

For this week, I had never used Google Photos before, I don’t think I had even heard about it. After playing with it this week, I was able to have a lot of great ideas as to how I can implement this Google resource into my classroom.

            Again, for this application, I would use it for my fifth grade ELAR and Social Studies classroom in a way that students will benefit from the storage space that is given. I would have the students pick an expository research topic they want to write about and gather pictures in a Google Photo album. Once they are able to gather a variety of pictures of their topic, then they are able to start writing on that specific topic. For example, the students might choose to write about volcanoes of fossils, in which they need to search for pictures to find a several pictures of that specific content. Once they are able to gather some pictures, then they can start writing about the features, description, etc. of the topic of their choice. Then, after they are done writing, they need to add the pictures that they had previously chosen and placed on the Google Photos and drop them in their final draft of their topic.

            Another idea to use Google Photos that can be used for the classroom is to have the students add pictures throughout the year that are of different school related activities that the students participate. This idea is mainly for a sixth-grade classroom and it wouldn’t really be for a specific grade because having the students gather all their pictures in one same album helps so that at the end of the year, the teacher can gather all the pictures of that class and have the resources to be able to make a slideshow of the sixth-grade class that is graduating and moving on to middle school.

            One last idea that I would use Google Photos in my fifth-grade ELAR classroom is to take pictures of all the anchor charts that we have gathered around the room, upload them to an album in Google Photos and share it with the students through Google Classroom so that the students are able to see it through the link. Many times, the students feel overwhelmed with so much information, especially in Reading class, that they don’t retain every single thing that is done inside the classroom. However, as they are in the classroom, they can refer back to them since they are posted on the walls. But having the notes that they have in their notebooks and the information posted around the classroom will help the students refer back to a single place and find all the notes and content covered in class.