Digital Photography and Digital Story Telling with students in grades 3-6

To Whom It May Concern:

Please read my proposal. After you have read the proposal please consider making a donation of equipment to West Rutland School to help make this project a success.

Thank you.
Nicole Graves


Digital Photography and Digital Story Telling
with Students in Grades 3-6
Nicole Graves
Art Teacher
West Rutland School

I was inspired after attending the workshop Seeing Through Students Eyes: Understanding Students Through Digital Photography with Matt Neckers at the 2010 ArtSpa Conference. Matt's photography program at Hyde Park Elementary School has inspired me is to create a photography program for my third, forth, fifth, and sixth grade students at West Rutland School. West Rutland School is a small K-12 school nestled outside of the City of Rutland. Forty-five percent of our students receive free and reduced lunch. Many of our students do not have access to computers at home let alone access to a digital camera.
Through this arts and technology integration project students will be able to take digital cameras home with them to photograph the world around them. Students will learn how to reflect on the world around them through writing about and talking about their photographs. Students will learn how to turn on a digital camera, operate the shutter and use the zoom lens. I will demonstrate proper handling of a camera and how to create successful photographic compositions. Students will learn be introduced to the history of photography. Students will learn how to edit their photographs using the photo editing software Adobe Photoshop Elements. Students will learn how to critically look at photographs through regular critiques. As a result of learning how to evaluate photographs, students will compose their own photographs in a more thoughtful and intentional way.
Teaching literacy through photography is an important objective of this project. Students will take photographs and will write about their lives and dreams. Using a Adesso Cyber Tablet, students will incorporate their stories written in their own hand writing into their photographs. The Adesso Cyber Tablet M14 Media Graphics Tablet is great for graphic artists and animators, architects and engineers, web designers and people who love to draw. It is ideal also for students and professional who are in to handwriting, sketching, coloring and editing photos. The tablet provides a total active area of 12" x 7.25" with an aspect ratio 0f 16:9 making it great for use with wide-format monitors and for video animation and graphics applications; but the tablet also has the ability to provide an active area with a more traditional 4:3 aspect ratio active area with the dimensions of 9.5" x 7.25".
Community is a major component in this digital photography project. Students will be involved in what I am calling "Capture the Community". This is where kids will be photographing community members and community events. They will make a "Town Square" website to bridge school-to-community relations.
Collaboration will take place between myself and classroom teachers more than it already does. We will focus specifically on literacy, language arts and photography. Photography is an excellent tool to gain insight into the lives of our students. A permission slip or release form will need to be created before cameras actually go home with students. Matt Neckers stated during the workshop at ArtSpa that he would be happy to share the one that he uses with me.
Time line: The biggest challenge of this project is going to be to secure funding to purchase equipment. In order to begin this project equipment needs to be purchased. We will need 2 to 4 digital cameras, four Dell laptops, four copies of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0, a Adesso Cyber Tablet, eight memory cards, and rechargeable batteries. This project will officially begin in the Fall of 2010 and will continue to develop and grow over the course of the 2010-2011 school year. In the next several weeks I will begin working with 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade teachers at West Rutland School to brainstorm ways to integrate this digital photography project idea into their existing language arts curriculum.
I am very passionate about this project and I will not stop working until it is successful. I am asking for your help. Please consider giving back to the community by donating equipment to this project at West Rutland School.