See the world. Investigate the evidence.

Almost every photograph in an investigation was made by Greg Smith on his own expeditions, and where one was not — a spacecraft image, say — the credit is shown beneath the frame. Each image carries a caption a student can cite, and its location where that has been confirmed, and each one is chosen because it raises a question rather than settling one.

Mission

Bringing images of the world to children to educate and inspire them about the best of life.

Vision

Taking the very best images of the world and creating educational and inspiring materials for students today and long into the future.

The archive behind the investigations is Greg Smith’s own: photographs made over forty years across seven continents, alongside a background in instructional design.

Who makes this

The photographs are Greg Smith’s, and so is the teaching design behind them. What follows is his own account of that background.

He holds a master’s degree in Instructional Design, Development and Evaluation from Syracuse University, and studied English Literature at the State University of New York at New Paltz on a full scholarship. He taught English for ten years in the Maricopa Community College District, building the curriculum for more than a hundred course sections, and developed technical curriculum for AT&T’s Corporate Education Center. Further afield, he has taught graduate project-management courses for USAID in Palestine, carried out research for the World Bank in the West Bank, and set up a vocational training school for USAID in the Kingdom of Lesotho.

The method is the same each time. Students meet a photograph with no caption and no context, work it as a primary source, pick up a short data set, and finish by making a claim they can defend from what they can actually see.

The project is early and says so. Investigations are published so teachers and Greg can review them on the real page rather than in a document, and any caption the photographer has not yet confirmed is labeled on the page as provisional. Scientific and educator review is the next step, not a step already taken.