You know what happens when you assume?

To be honest, when I first thought about photosharing I considered it to be an “old” technology! I thought, putting pictures on the internet is no big deal and there really cannot be much educational value to being able to see other people’s pictures on the internet. This is definitely not going to be a web 2.0 tool that I need to use personally or in my teaching. But just to be sure I wasn’t overlooking anything I decided to create a Flickr account and check it out. Turns out, I was…..

….WRONG!

In this case, I am happy to admit it too! (Just ask my husband, this doesn’t happen often!). After getting familiar with Flickr, I started to upload my pictures, adding tags to them, sharing them with a few new friends I found and started to come up with ideas for how this could be used in education.

Besides the very cool suggestions by Richardson (2009), connecting with people around the world, start online discussions by posting comments on pictures, labeling student made models or projects, borrowing pictures from others on Flickr and adding them to your tags, photo field trips or using pictures for digital storytelling, I have come up with a few of my own. Think of the implications this tool can have on the high school year book committee! Students can create their own captions to the pictures they are in to then be published in the yearbook. What about students publishing pictures of their own artwork for exposure?

As a teacher-librarian I am an organization maniac….here is a tool that will allow me to organize my pictures! I can already see that I will be carrying my digital camera around a lot more as I will take pictures that relate to what I am teaching, upload them onto my Flickr account and show them to my students allowing them to post comments. For example, I am beginning to plan a collaborative unit on weather for the grade 4 classes in my school. I was wondering where I was going to come up with a way to show them real technologies that are used to measure weather. Well…digital field trip here we come! I can also snap pictures of the different clouds that I see in the next two weeks and have students use the smart board to categorize them when we learn about cloud types and how we can use them to predict the weather.

What I like most about Flickr is the ability to tag photos. This tool in itself provides a plethora of opportunities for you to share pictures with others, borrow pictures from others and organize your own pictures in a useful way in no time. There are many other easy to use features that draw me to this tool including the organization tools, the ability to have contacts or friends on your account to share your photos with, the ability to put your contacts or friends into groups to share on mass and the every interesting ability to look at publicly shared photos from around the world. Today for instance, I found the spot on Flickr where you can see the most interesting photos posted in the last 7 days and they are gorgeous…frame-able! If I were a visual arts teacher, this tool would be my new best friend.

I did check out Picasa as well. I signed up for an account to check it out and did not find it near as easy to navigate or as quick to upload the pictures. In the short time I spent on Picassa I did not get near as far as the same time spent on Flickr.

With a cup of tea, I am now going to enjoy ‘traveling the world by photosharing on Flickr’. Won’t you join me?

Andrea

Richarson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.