Medium Specificity

For this assignment, I created a mosaic. This particular mosaic is a potential gift to my husband filled with pictures of us from the time we met to where we are now as we're weeks away from starting a new journey with a baby.  It was a lot more time-consuming than I imagined! Selecting pictures took the longest, and involved several pitfalls of selecting over 100 pictures, then something would crash and I'd have to reselect everything, or try to create a new folder so I could just "select folder" instead, but then the folder wouldn't upload... technical difficulties at its finest. So maybe it was just time consuming for me and it usually wouldn't be an issue.  I had to try out two different ways of creating this mosaic. At first, I tried to create it on the computer. The uploading time for pictures to be transferred from my Google Photos took forever, and then it crashed. But I liked that I had the option to upload pictures from Google Photos, Instagram, my computer, Facebook, or a few other places.  However, when my computer didn't work, I switched to selecting images off my phone.  This was SO much easier! I used an app, the app had access to my google photos (and I still had the option to use the other sites from before), and I could scroll through and select pictures without the slow upload time of the computer. 

My thought process in doing this mosaic was that it could be used as a creative assignment in the classroom.  My immediate ideas were to use it as a get to know you activity where the student fills the individual picture cells with pictures of themselves or things that describe themselves, or it could be used as a final for a unit where the student fills the cells with visual connections they made.  For example, say we finished reading a play. The students would then be assigned to create a mosaic filled with pictures that describe the play from their own perspective. 

The great thing about a mosaic is that you can have a range of pictures to help describe one bigger picture. You could have anywhere from 25 repeated pictures to 7,500 individual pictures. This can be nice because it doesn't necessarily limit students to one thing and they can express a lot of different thoughts. Another positive is that it's visual, which is generally more engaging for students. Also, students can pull their pictures from multiple sources.  They can use their own images, or they can find things like stock photos that help showcase their thoughts.

Limitations would be that these are still pictures, so those with a strength in other things like film might not have full creative power. Unless they did a stop-motion like idea across the mosaic to tell their story... that would be cool. Another limitation is that they most likely wouldn't be able to draw their own images into this mosaic, unless they took a picture of it and then uploaded it.

As a teacher evaluates a mosaic assignment, they might sit down with the student and ask about individual pictures that make up the mosaic as well as the general big picture.  Why did the student pick a particular image? What does it say about the subject being described? Did they find 150 pictures? What is the general theme of the mosaic? For example, if they're depicting a play, what part of the play are they truly focusing on and why? I think the best thing about this idea is that students can use countless images to help them describe a single thing, so they can get pretty detailed in their descriptions. Also, the students have to be intentional with each image.  They can't just pull out random things and think it'll look cool. Each image has purpose to create the whole.