Thing 7

Think of ways you may be able to use Flickr in your classroom and share your ideas. What issues might you face?


This is an awesome site. I will say, however, that I did tag all my photos (downloaded from my trip to Europe in 2007) with RESA23, but none of them showed up when I searched that tag. I'm not sure what happened or how I should look that up.

Another question I have is whether I can download just my own pictures or whether I can download pictures from the internet, from Flickr, or other sources. I thought I saw some pictures downloaded that I recogized from my exploration of Flickr, but I could be mistaken.

This could be a useful site for use in the classroom. I could download photos of a certain topic and show them to students, or send them there to view the photos and read descriptions. Students could use these photographs as springboards for writing -- narratives and description come to mind. Students could make Flickr accounts to accompany their own personal narratives or to illustrate their imaginings of what characters and places look like in the literature we read in class. A similar feature that I was introduced to at a tech in-service day at my high school is Photostory. This site offers a fantastic way to have students group photographs and link them together with transitions that make the photos come alive. Appropriate music can be added right from a collection on the site. I played around with that site and added images right from Google to present the myth of "Cupid and Psyche" -- all in a matter of minutes.

Issues I could face using Flickr is the public vs. private photos. I wouldn't want to require that my students' personal pictures be out there in the public. We would have to have a group of "friends" so that the collections would only be visible to a select group. Another issue would be training. When we use these applications in the classroom, we have a wide range of skill. Some students will need training, some will not. I imagine most of the students will pick this up easily, certainly faster than their teacher! I think a drawback for me is that it takes me longer to use these applications than my students. I can use them, but if something goes wrong, I don't trouble-shoot very easily and that wastes a lot of precious class time. I'd need to get more comfortable using any application myself before I'd use it for an assignment. Using such applications would certainly make presentations more interesting than a bunch of xerox copies and some words printed on a poster board!