Last week, I decided to make up a very small assignment for my college level Multimedia Presentations Class. The assignment was to use a royalty free picture site such as Http://www.sxc.hu to find 10 Jpg formatted photos in a topic relating to multimedia. For example: 10 photos of musical instruments to represent sound.
They were supposed to download them to their desktop and then use the MS Paint software to save 2 each in the following formats, Tiff, Gif, Png, Monochome BMP and regular BMP. Our book chapter concerning graphics had discussed all of these. After converting these, they were to use their Google sites , create a new page and insert a table that would display one photo in each cell.
Well, at first I was thinking that this assignment was very elementary and probably an insult to their level of graphics related knowledge because most students in this class were digital media majors. However, I was in for a big surprise.
As the students started working on this assignment, one student called me over. She had just converted the first photo to a Gif format. She asked me why the image did not look as good as before and seemed blurry.
Well, this gave me the opportunity to tell her and the class that the Gif format should never be used for regular photos. It should only be used for logos, thumbnails and small animated images. It had a limit of only 256 colors which were not enough to create sharp looking photos.
The next student quickly called me over and asked me why the photo she just converted to the Monochrome BMP format was now black and white. I quickly told her and the class that this was exactly what Monochrome BMP format was supposed to do.
Still another student called me to her workstation and asked why she could not upload the two .Tiff format images to her Google site to insert into her table. This gave me the opportunity to tell the class that when you convert a .jpg to a .tiff format, the image sometimes gets corrupted and that is why it would not upload.
Of course, most of this information was covered in the chapter in our book but I guess that the information did not hit home until they actually completed the hands on assignment.
So I guess I learned a valuable lesson. I should never overestimate what my students already know as doing so might result in a missed opportunity for my students to learn new things. I am now more confident that none of the students are going to miss questions about these topics during the midterm exam.