Photographing Student Writing, a Trial

nz teachers recently spoke about photographing student writing on the ict in english listserv. this concept attracted me, as i love using my phone for pix, video, etc, and bluetoothing whatever to my lappy in seconds.  i thought it would be a nifty technique to trial, as i am currently thinking of how to revamp the writing programme at my school. i thought i'd give it a whirl this morning, when i was meeting with the scholarship students who were bringing introductory paragraphs on different texts. here's how it went:

7 am:  arrived at school.  in preparation before the students arrived, i took a trial photo of my own handwritten paragraph. in response, my phone locked up and wouldn't even let me access the list of photos. an urgent tweet (thank goodness for twitter!) resulted in a message of "connect your phone directly to your laptop with your usb cord & move all the photos off. the memory must be full."

7.10  hadn't gotten around to installing my phone's software on this laptop, but had the disk handy. installed the programme, connected the phone ... and nothing happened.  well, something happened. every technique i tried to move the photos, copy the photos, delete the photos, resulted in the same message:  "access denied." tried again without phone programme, just using the phone as another hdd with files. no joy.

7.20  fortunately, a student arrived 10 minutes early, armed with a bluetooth phone. we took a photo of his work and tried to push it to my laptop. my laptop could not "find" his phone, even though his phone found my laptop! repeated tries to connect failed.

7.30 the other students arrived, so i gave up.

reflection:  we did just fine this morning working "the old fashioned way."  however, as we each read our paragraphs, then passed them around to calls of, "can i see that?" i recognised how much easier it would have been to flick up each paragraph on the projector screen, with chunks of the original texts included for ease of reference. we would even be able to revise and keep all our work together in google docs, which will track the revision. and we wouldn't have to use up paper resources by printing copies of everything for each other.  i will be trying this again as soon as i manage to clear the 332 photos off my mobile - i am not daunted! looking forward to really giving it a go!