Our third South Side Middle School Jr. Tech Camp was a big success! My criteria for success is fairly simple. If the students enjoy what we’re doing and have fun with it, it’s a success. If excitement, laughter, and spontaneous applause are any indication, our campers definitely enjoyed themselves.

Since our theme for this six weeks is Memphis, our campers used pictures from around town to learn how to crop and edit digital photographs and create their own slideshow, using Memphis music.

Last weekend, my husband and I drove around town, taking pictures of Memphis’ major attractions, colleges, businesses, historical interests, etc. I ended up with about 100 pictures but pared it down to 50 photographs, which I loaded onto my flash drive. I also compiled a CD of 8 songs related to Memphis. It didn’t take very long, then, to upload the pictures and songs into iPhoto and iTunes on each of the laptops we were using for this camp session.

I had originally planned to use Picasa (I really like Picasa!) but later decided it’d be better to use our Mac laptop cart in the library instead of our computer lab downstairs. Our laptops have older operating systems that won’t support Picasa for Mac, so we stuck with iPhoto. It worked beautifully for our purposes. The students’ artistic flair was apparent as they adjusted the tint and slanted the pictures to create “art house” photographs. I was impressed!

I intended to export the slideshows to iDVD and burn them onto dvds for the campers to take home. I knew our laptops didn’t have dvd burners but thought that I could use an external dvd burner instead. It didn’t work. I’m still determined to get these beautiful slideshows loaded onto dvds so the kids can play them on a dvd player at home. I’ll post later and tell y’all what hoops I have to jump through to get that done.

In the meantime, here is an Animoto video of some of our campers pictures. I love what they’ve done!