The Guardian Eyewitness App

Lately, I have been looking at iPad apps for the purposes of teaching and learning in a distance education (DE) course. The last app I explored is the Guardian Eyewitness App, which is labeled as a Curricula Support app by iTunes. The app is a collection of single photographs from the Guardian’s past 100 days – one photo for each of the 100 days. Every day a new photograph is added to the collection as the new photograph replaces the photo from the 100th day.

I feel this app benefits both the instructor and the students in a DE course. It benefits the instructor in that the app allows for the sharing of a current event photograph via email, Twitter, or Facebook. One could share the photo—in addition to a text write up—with their students as an introduction to an upcoming module/unit/activity or as a reflection to a module/unit/activity. The only shortfall to the photo sharing is that the photo can only be shared outside of a learning management system (LMS)—Moodle, Desire2Learn, Blackboard—as copying it from email, Twitter, or Facebook, and uploading it to an LMS may be a copyright violation – one would have to double-check with their campus copyright officer, first, before doing so.

Students—especially those with a visual learning style—benefit from the app as they receive an image along with the instructor’s introductory/reflection notes in regards to a particular module/unit/activity. Receiving shared images, even though it is outside the LMS, can be a powerful learning experience as the images available through the app are truly global/diverse in nature.

Guardian Eyewitness App: http://www.guardian.co.uk/mobile/ipad/eyewitness