In chapter 7, Will Richardson looks at photos, images and online organizers as powerful tools for student expression and igniters for project ideas. Leading the pack in this corner of web2.0 is the photo sharing site Flickr.com. Flickr allows users to upload digital images, organize them into albums or "photostreams" and set permissions for who to share them with. One of the founding struts of the site is the use of tags (there's that word-of-the-day again, aaaaahhhhh!…oh, flashback to the days of Pee-Wee's Playhouse, my apologies) to organize photos for searching later as well as take advantage of a growing number of web2.0 tools. For example, you can create RSS feeds from Flickr based on specific tags. For teachers and students, an important place to visit on Flickr is their Creative Commons section. I like how Flickr provides a legend to educate us about the different types of permissions photo authors can give and how they would like their images treated and referenced. This provides an important teaching opportunity to educate students on citing sources from the Internet; citation is just as important for images as it is for text. In fact, some general search engines now have filters under their "advanced search" tool that allow you to find content that has been tagged with Creative Commons permissions. Google | Yahoo! | Flickr
The potential for teachers to enrich assignments using Flickr are quite numerous and continue to grow. Just a few of the ideas Richardson mentions are: photo field trips, random writes and Make It Mine. And the projects do not have to be complex. Richardson describes a simply activity where students go to Flickr and in the search bar type in the first word that comes to mind. Then, they take the first image listed in the search results and writes a story about it. Check out my Diigo link list for several web2.0 applications highlighted in the book that use Flickr to enhance web content.
My Flickr Photostream
Diigo: Book link list
