Many times in the classroom, photos taken by the teacher or by students are used for many reasons: to document group or project work, to show evidence of learning, to identify real-world examples, etc. However, collecting, displaying and re-distributing all of these photos by the teacher back with the class can be a cumbersome process.
In the old-school days, I would have students bring digital cameras from home or use school cameras to go out and take photographs for certain lessons or activities. Then, I would gather all of the cameras, do my best to connect them to my computer to import the photos, and then use a tool like Photoshop or iPhoto to export the photos to create a web page that I could post to my site so that the students could see all of the photos taken for the activity or project. I found this activity to be very beneficial with my science students, but many teachers would not take the time nor would they have the knowledge and expertise to do this, especially in a timely manner.
Yogile.com has helped me to streamline this process. Instead of gathering photos myself, I just need to set up an account and create a new album on Yogile. The service has a very clean layout, and is very easy to use and discover what it can do. Once you have an album, Yogile will then:
- allow me to upload photos from my computer directly to the album
- give me a custom email address that anyone can use to post photos to the album by simply attaching them to the message – very easy to send from a smartphone, camera phone or other mobile device
- give me a custom URL to display the photos in the album
- allow me to name & caption all of the photos in the album
- allow me to view the album as a slideshow, download all of the photos in the album with a click, or easily share the album on Twitter & Facebook
- will even create the code needed to embed the album on a Web site
There are a couple of drawbacks when using the free version of the service. Uploaded photos are automatically deleted after 14 days, so I would advise downloading the photos once they are all gathered or submitted. Also, Uploads are limited to 100 MB of photos per month per account or album. For $45/year, you can remove both of these restrictions.