You can very easily add images to a course on the VLE, but what about a whole series of images? Also why would you do this?
Imagine that you are a catering lecturer and you have taken a series of images of a cooking technique, it could have been boning a chicken, filleting a fish, cutting carrots… It would be nice to be able to add the images to the VLE and importantly allow learners to access those images easily and simply. It’s not just catering, plumbing, electrical, construction, motor vehicle engineering, biology…
Another reason is that the learners have been on a field trip and a series of photographs was taken and you want to share those images not just with those learners who went, but those that didn’t or couldn’t.
Think about an assignment based on a particular city or town, a gallery of images can be used to show off attractions or places in that place.
On Moodle I have been using Lightbox Gallery.
As well as creating a very attractive gallery of images you can configure the Moodle module to allow learners to comment on the images.
One of the features I do like about this, is that though it is useful to resize the images (from a disk space perspective) if the practitioner does not have the skills (or probably more likely doesn’t have the software) to resize the images. If the images are uploaded as is to Lightbox Gallery then Lightbox Gallery will resize them for the end user depending on their screen resolution.
Another attraction of Lightbox Gallery is that it can also be used to show off a PowerPoint presentation without the learner needing to download and open the presentation – also useful if that learner does not have PowerPoint or is accessing the VLE from a mobile device.
Showing a gallery of images is a nice visual way of enhancing a learning activity.