home

Many of us join a 365 project only to feel bad when we cannot keep it going for every day of the year. Some of us DO keep it going and find new ways to look at our lives as we look through the lens of a camera. Thinking of taking a picture every day often makes us look at our world differently.

Many of us, as educators, rarely go for long without thinking of our kids, our classroom, a lesson, a plan, or something to do with school. SInce we do that, and since everyone seems to enjoy looking for pictures for a 'photo a day' project, it might be fun to combine the two. **What if we took a conceptual look at our world, through our eyes as parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and colleagues, yet keeping in mind our calling--our profession--our jobs as educators?**

The idea is for each of us to take pictures throughout the month where all the photos share visual representations of our understanding of the word we have chosen or the word we choose for that month. At the end of the month, we write a synopsis of our process on the wiki page, include a link to our set of pictures and perhaps post the one we like best on the wiki as well. Thus, each page of the wiki becomes a compilation of our collective understanding of the word of the month. (You can take a picture a day, one a week, or just when the mood strikes or you see something that resonates with you.) The options are open, so you can fit this into YOUR schedule.

The thought behind this project is to find multiple pictures that portray a certain word and choose one (at least) to share on the wiki with some words describing how you looked at the word differently by looking at it in pictures over time. That time may be a month, or it may be over the course of the year.

Maybe some months would be easier to keep up than others, so if we set up a conceptual lens for each month, we could choose the months that would suit us time-wise and not have to feel bad if we couldn't keep up the photo a day for 365 days of the year. Maybe we'd want to try one month, maybe one each season, and maybe we'd complete every month. The choice, however, would be ours to decide how much and how frequently we'd participate. We could look at our world for photo opps that would express that concept, and perhaps our understanding of that concept, our thinking about that concept, our talking and reflecting about that concept would change and deepen if we looked at the world with THAT lens over time.

(Please check out the **Simple Directions Page** and **Participants** page when you finish reading this intro, if you're interested). Don't forget to join the Flickr group [|EduImages].

And, see the background page for more info and some other questions we might want to consider together as we embark upon this journey.

January Reflections