Chapter 7
Fun With Flickr
Creating, Publishing, and Using Images Online
§ Teachers and students can experiment with digital photography to create, publish, and use images online for display in their classroom community.
§ Introducing Flickr on the web – a social software where the contributors interact, share, and learn from each other in creative and interesting ways; capturing daily events or highlights, field trips, speakers, visitors, and special projects. This photo stream is a great way to share teaching and learning experiences (p.102).
§ Flickr is free if you publish under100 MB of images and about 90 seconds each a month of more than two 500 MB videos.
§ You can sign up for a “pro” account for $24.95 a year gives you unlimited uploads unlimited storage, and unlimited viewing ability.
§ You need to register with Flickr in order to publish photos or take part in discussions, and you need a valid e-mail address. As a suggestion to use with your class, you could create one login for all of your students to share or have them create their own accounts; just follow the standard login procedures from Flickr’s homepage.
§ Adding images to Flickr is easy, just click on the upload link, find the image on your computer that you want to publish, and click “Upload.”
§ Learning with Flickr – What can you do with Flickr in the classroom? According to David Jakes, an educational technology coordinator from Illinois who blogs about using the Web to create digital stories suggests: see (tinyurl.com/38wsm5), create presentations, slide shows, cobble together virtual field trips, illustrate poetry, teach geography by integrating with Google Earth (p. 103-104).
§ One of the most useful tools in Flickr is the annotation feature, which alalows you to add notes to parts of the image simply by dragging a box across an area and typing text into a form (p.104).
§ Another great feature is the ability to communicate in online discussions about the images you post by adding comments under any particular photo.
§ You can subscribe to these discussions via the RSS feed that Flickr creates for your “Recent Comments.”
§ One of the real great powers of Flickr lines in the way it can connect people from around the world.
§ Tag or use keyword phrases for images, i.e., wedding, vacation, family, and friends.
§ In order to subscribe to a particular tag so you can receive any new photos that people post with the keywords “schnauzer” or “skiing’ or even “sleepwalking”, copy the URL www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sleepwalking (or whatever tag you want to end with) and then paste it into the “Add Subscription” line in your Google Reader (p.105).
§ If your students are studying other countries or cultures, Flickr can be an incredible resource of images and information, and with teacher moderation, there can be opportunities to meet and learn with other people and students from other countries (p. 106).
§ Flickr has become a powerful tool for amateur journalists who use their camera phones to email photos right to the Flickr pages, posting images almost as they happen (p.107).
§ Steve Brooks writes the Edugadget Weblog where you can find “plain-talking technology reviews for teachers” (www.edugadget.com ). Brooks also likes “Creative Commons” section of Flickr where teachers can be sure students are using images appropriately (p. 108).
§ People love Flickr so much that there have been a host of creative applications built around it, some of which also have interesting uses in the classroom. “Flickr Toolbox: 100+Tools for Flickr Addicts”, see www.tinyurl.com/24y5m4 for the most comprehensive list on the Web (p. 109).
§ Turn any one of your pictures into front-page news with the Flickr Magazine Cover; www.tinyurl.com/2vl7j.
§ The possibilities here are endless, limited only by your imagination and your own understanding of these tools.
§ This is the power of the Read/Write Web, the ablity to create and connect content through publishing.
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