Gigapan Outreach

GigaPan was highlighted in three booths during the science fair at the Internacional School of Aldeia (EIA) in Camaragibe - PE, Brazil.

16 Carnegie Mellon University students spent their spring break in Belfast, Northern Ireland as part of a new Art, Conflict and Technology course, a collaboration between CMU CREATE Lab, College of Fine Art and Department of English. Read more about the trip here or view their GigaPans here.

This week, The Aquatic Macoroinvertebrates Collection won the Engaging category of the national IXD Awards. The Interaction Design (IXD) Awards recognize and celebrate examples of excellence in Interaction Design across domains, channels, environments and cultures. 

<p>We recently had the pleasure of working to help organize a cultural exchange through GigaPan between&nbsp;<b></b>Lycée Louise Michel in Grenoble, France and Manchester Craftsmen's Guild Youth &amp; Arts here in Pittsburgh, PA. &nbsp;</p><p>The partnership between these classrooms was born of a shot in the dark, an e-mail sent to Manchester Bidwell Corporation after watching an especially moving TED talk by Bill Strickland. After a discussion between Paolo Nzambi and Dave Deily in Pittsburgh, and Rebecca Clark in Grenoble, we decided a virtual exchange could be set up between two schools across the Atlantic. The project is being led by Rebecca and Justin Mazzei of the Manchester Craftmen's Guild.<br></p><p><b>Their one aim for this collaboration is for the world to get a little smaller for our students, and for them to understand themselves, their surroundings and empathize with others, their environments, surroundings, and cultures.&nbsp;</b>Their aim is to help teens see that the world is just a village, to be shared by all, so that we can learn to appreciate each other&nbsp;and the wealth of our diversity.<br></p><p>The project began by a first videoconference, which took place on March 27th, 2014. In order to accommodate both groups, they met at 6:00pm for the French students and 12:00 for the Americans!</p><p>Says Rebecca, it was really great to be able to talk to students on the other side of the world about school and studies. The French students did a great job speaking English and the Americans had set up a great videoconferencing theater.</p><p>Justin Mazzei, teaching artist coordinator from MCG Youth and Arts, proposed using CREATE Lab and their Gigapan project as a way for students to share pictures and talk about their lives. Below are some of their images.</p><p>

<iframe src="http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/156115/options/nosnapshots,fullscreen/iframe/flash.html" width="500" height="250" frameborder="0"></iframe>

<br><iframe src="http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/156163/options/nosnapshots,fullscreen/iframe/flash.html" width="500" height="250" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>

For the past six years, CREATE Lab GigaPan outreach has inspired projects in 20 countries, engaging 1,176 educators, 6,371 students, and 153 leading scientists across the globe. 

Today we are proud to announce the release of a GigaPan curriculum collection including 20 lesson plans, based on projects that were developed and implemented by 41 of our partner educators, featuring a variety of content areas and unique approaches to GigaPan. We're proud to show off their work.

The curriculum collection is available on: gigapan.com/cms/use-learn.
Each unit details the related common core and state standards.

In addition to our gratitude toward our partner educators, we dedicate a very special thank you to Jennifer Geist of  Zeitgeist Creations Global Education Tools, who curated all the unit plans and uniformly formatted them for easy reference and implementation. To complete the collection, Jennifer bundled these units with educator guides for online resources, hardware, activity ideas as well as a project design template.

Photography becomes transformative when the image maker is empowered to capture what is most valuable to them, and even more so when they share this perspective with others. By creating and sharing GigaPan images, educators, students, and scientists can share the stories of their own landscapes and ignite conversations with participating groups all over the world. 

We asked some of the educators featured in this collection to share their perspective about GigaPan. 

Here's what they said:

Elizabeth Lallathin, Kellogg Elementary School, Huntington WV, USA

"Using GigaPan in my classroom has allowed all readers access to inferencing skills and to be part of a greater conversation. Images found on gigapan.com have become a virtual window to the settings of books, lessons, and news. Readers are able to place themselves inside of the picture and see it close up. The images grab the audience and hold the attention begging the onlooker to inquire more deeply with every zoom...GigaPan is a tool that I highly respect and enjoy using within my classroom."

Download Elizabeth's projects: World of Diversity and Travels Through Literature

Hari Prasetyo, SMA Al-Izhar, Jakarta, Indonesia

David Williams, Huntington High School, Huntington WV, USA

"What I liked about the GigaPan is that it allowed the students to make discoveries without me telling them and it allowed me to see what interested them. It allowed their peers to help them because they were the only ones online to communicate with. It made the students excited and engaged. I had fully engaged students and by being on the computers students that might not participate in discussions could discuss via the keyboard. This project did a good job hooking my students on learning about the Incas."

Download David's project, Inca & Ancient Civilizations, here

Linda Twedt, South Fayette Middle School, McDonald PA, USA

"The magic of GigaPan is as much in what it can show as in what it can 'erase'. With assistance, we were able to peek inside the contents of a frozen food truck seemingly without the doors. GigaPan excites the students with its Facebook-style interface, allowing them to use their foreign language skills to get to know their partners, who may live many thousands of miles away."

Download Linda's project, Alimentation/Nutrition, here

Briana, student of Brandon Keat, Propel School, Pittsburgh PA, USA

“I must admit Gigapanning for me became a new craving! All I thought about when I walked around was 'this would be a great place to do a GigaPan.' I learned it all – how to set the machine up and how to adjust everything correctly and take awesome pictures. It was an amazing experience and I'm glad I got to be apart of it!"  

Download Briana's classroom's social studies project here

Khosi Ntuli, Tlhatlogang Junior Secondary School, Soweto, South Africa

"I am an educator teaching Life Orientation at Tlhatlogang Junior Secondary in South Africa. Students are faced with challenging dilemmas. Life is all about choices and priorities. My subject aims at equipping them with skills and techniques to face their challenging background. Meeting with other educators made me realize that one way or the other we are all the same. We are faced with the challenge of changing the minds of those kids that God has placed to our care.”

Download Khosi's project, Global Health, here

Becky Severino, Beverly Elementary School, Beverly WV, USA

"The Self-Portrait GigaPan project sprang from a discussion with a preschool teacher about found objects. We decided that we would ask our students to go on a treasure hunt at home and bring to school any small treasures they could find. We used the objects as springboards for creative play. When it seemed that the students had exhausted all possibilities, we introduced the concept of self-portraits. Using the GigaPan site, we visited museums and art galleries to see original self-portraits by famous artists. We used our found treasures to build faces, working without glue so that we could change our work, revisit it, recreate the faces depending on the objects chosen. Finally we created our own self-portraits. We then created puppets from our objects and wrote stories about their lives.

Bonnie Conner, Milton Middle School, Milton WV, USA

"I created the project for a classification unit I do near the end of the year. My students are always amazed at how the GigaPan works. Students enjoy trying to find the organisms and classify them. I even taught a student teacher how to use the GigaPan last year and used it in my digital imaging club with 6, 7, and 8th graders."

Download Bonnie's project, Nine Phyla of the Animal Kingdom, here

Marti Louw, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA, USA

"Gigapixel technology brings a 21st century spin to the natural history diorama. Explorable images not only make accessible the remote, rare and hard to see, the technology enables learners to explore, observe and discover meaning in their own way."

Download Marti's project, Stories in Rock, here

Jason Jackson, Beverly Hills Middle School, Huntington WV, USA

In this project we will look at how Greek and Roman architecture has inspired modern buildings in Washington D.C. and then in Huntington W.V.

Look at the gigapans of Greek and Roman architecture. What do you notice when you look at the buildings? What is the style of Greek and Roman architecture?  Why do you think it is still used today?

Compare it to the gigipans of Washington D.C., do you see many similarities? Why would Greek and Roman design be used in Washington DC.?

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/211

This is the headquarters of Eyes as Big as Plates on a two month artist residency in New York's Redhook. A collaboration between the Norwegian photographer Karoline Hjorth and Finnish artist Riitta Ikonen, Eyes as Big as Plates photography series explores older people's nature relationship.

Students read and examined tales from international and national authors. They first researched elements of writing, types of narration, styles of characters, the time in which the tale took place, the location, and the social-cultural context. Afterwards they used the GigaPan to photograph themselves as they represented the author’s vision. Students had to represent characters so they dressed themselves up as their particular character would.  They decided to act out a scenario and with roles in place used the GigaPan to record the scene. When the GigaPan finished the recording the images were uploaded to the GigaPan Dialogues Community education website. Students shared the GigaPan image with other classrooms that in turn did the same.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/197

Elementary students in a small town in West Virginia study different rivers and the seasonal impact upon them.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/191

The projects goal is to share images of Western Pennsylvania native plant and tree species. Also to compare waterways of McCutcheon Run at McKeever and "The Ponds" at Burgettstown.

If you have access to the education.gigapan.org site, find more details here: http://education.gigapan.org/project/41