Flickr Use for Teachers
Inspired by Teaching Sagittarius, I decided to start working on a post about Flickr. Since I am planning on introducing Flickr itself and its many mash-up programs to my faculty at school soon, this is a good time to compile resources I have been collecting on my del.icio.us account, tagged flickr.
The first question I will need to answer to from the teachers will be:
Why do I need to use a site like Flickr? Won’t it be enough, if I organize my images on my hard drive in folders?
So let’s start from scratch.
Flickr is not just an online storing site for your photos. Flickr also is an amazing resource for creative commons images from OTHERS that are at your fingertips and always ready to use in your classroom with, for and by your students. While I don’t pretend that I use Flickr to its full potential (social aspect of joining groups, leaving comments, etc), I have created a little universe for my photos that allow me to quickly upload, access, sort, organize, AND (the most important part for me) use these images in MANY different venues and applications.
I use one of the free Flickr upload tools, called Uploadr, which you can download for free on the tools page. Uploading becomes a simple drag and drop affair.
Once the images are on Flickr, you can organize them into sets, tag them with keywords, add a title and description. Depending on your organizational and planing skills the feature of creating sets and tags is extremely helpful when you want to show a particular set of images to your students in a flash via a slideshow for example. Simply click on the particular tag (or multiple ones to get results from combined tags) and voila you have your unique slideshow.
Now let’s pretend you have all your photos uploaded, organized and tagged in Flickr. Now is when the real fun and use for me begins: Mash Up Applications.
According to Wikipedia Mash Ups are:
In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool
Which means for me, that I can create new things with different tools without having to upload over and over again the same images for the different sites/tools, finding my images with the same tags, sets and descriptions that I organized them in Flickr. Most of these programs require you to authorize them accessing your images in Flickr. In order to use them you will need to grant access.
Here are my Flickr mash ups for teachers list. They are all free to use and I never had to upload any of my photos to create the new ones:
Captioner
Add captions to your photos. Downside can’t just save image with caption easily. Have to use additional screen capture tool
Bookr
Create a photo book easy as 1-2-3, by adding a flickr username and a tag set. Embed into your blog.
Dumpr
Creative and fun things to do with your photo. Sketches, place you image in a museum frame, jigsaw puzzles etc.
Splashr
Create unique slideshows from your Flickr images to emebed into your blog.
Bubblr
Create your own comic strips with photos from Flickr.
More resources to Flickr Mash-up tools:
Endnote:
I have had a HORRIBLE time creating this post. The layout of the site has been terribly messed up. The slideshows, imgaes, books, comics were all created in a flash. The main problem was to embed them into my blog. I don’t know if it is my particular WP theme that is not friendly to the code, that I tried to upload so many different codes all in one blog or another problem…
It has taken me almost two hours trying to trouble shoot the layout issues after all the codes was embedded. I even tried to cut all the codes out and one by one pasting them back in to find out which the culprit was. To no avail…. At this point, I have thrown in the towel and need to leave the computer before I throw it out of the window. 
I apologize for not being able to show you an example directly embedded into the post.
Great post, Silvia!
I do, however, have two questions:
1. If I want to use, say, Bookr or Bubblr with my Spanish 2 students, how would I create an account for each student?
2. How would I store their work?
Hi Silvia
I enjoyed reading your post. I find that Flickr can be used by students to learn about taxonomy via tagging of images and they can do a little critical thinking by adding embedded notes to their images.
I have also had problems with WordPress of late. Carriage returns, paragraph tags and other other code bits are stripped out as I alternate between code and visual edit mode. Some of my recent posts have indeed taken one or more hours to format.
At this point in time I blaming my Macintosh and not WordPress. Performing the same task on my wife’s PC has no issues.
Cheers
John
Miss Profe,
1. With bookr and bubblr you don’t need to register at all. All you need to know is the username of a Flickr account (and if you want to the tags). That username does not have to be your own. Try it out by putting in “langwitches” as the username and “argentina” as the tag. You can create a book with my photos.
So there is no need to create accounts for each of your students (which is nice). I would suggest to create a Flickr account for yourself though and start adding your spanish class related photos and tagging them. Ex. spain, food, traditions, history, “vocabulary-units” etc. Once you have a good collection, just tell your students your username and the tag of the photos that you want them to use and voila!
This will also come in handy when using voicethread, where you can import directly from Flickr any set that you have created.
2. As for storing their work, they can embed or e-mail the finished product to you.
Thanks for this post. This is great as I am doing full staff workshops on our use of Flickr in our school. Just wondering if your problems might have been related to the problems Flickr has been having all weekend. They have been up and down all weekend.
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