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:

• The Great Flickr Tool Collection

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.

Creative Imgages- BeFunky

Having fun with a web based Image editing BeFunky.com site this morning - Funky ways to express yourself. This link came to me via Steve Dembo’s post “Make your Digital photos befunky“. Steve does a great job in reviewing the site, so click on over there to read his detailed review.

I would add to Steve’s review the added features that allow you to customize your photos with Speech Balloons, Graphic Text, other accessories, such as hats, glasses, jewelry,etc.

I know that my elementary school students would have had a blast playing with this site, BUT of course since it is free there are the dreaded ads. Right after the first login a google ad for “sexy something” was displayed prominently right above my image.

So, working with my students together on this site is out, but I can see some fun for the teacher using it to create personalized coloring book pages for the little ones with the sketch feature alone.

It also has potential for creating “less identifying images” for and from our students. I try teach them that if you must upload a public image to the web, do not use a high resolution detailed photograph, but rather reduce to a lower resolutio, which does not lend itself to further alterations or quality printing.

Outsider Glimpse. Who and What is Strange?

Crosspost from Egypt Blog .

While the boat is waking slowly to life, I am enjoying once again the quiet deck. Looking out on the West side of the boat, there are about 30+ horse carriages lined up in front of the boat�s exit. They are waiting for the passengers to get off and take them on a tour to the Temple of Edfou. The carriages have occupied the entire street. Cars that are trying to pass through are honking an echoing horn. There seems to be some order in this chaos though. Every once in a while everyone starts shouting and arguing. Maybe some carriage skipped the line and positioned itself in a more favorable place. I can�t understand what they are saying, but the voices do sound angry.

One man is feeding his horse, while I hear other horses neighing towards the food. The state which these poor animals are in from our point of view is heart breaking. They are extremely thin and you can count each one of their ribs. Although it is still early and the morning and not that hot outside, I can�t prevent imagining how thirsty these horses must get in a few hours after being �beaten� through the streets carrying tourists. None of them seems to ever have seen a brush.

I know that I am seeing just an outsider�s glimpse, just a frozen moment in time of the lives of these people. Everyone is out to earn a living. I have the mind and cultural background of a �Westerner�, we grow up with the notion of animals, such as cats, dogs and horses being our pets and friends. We do not use them to work and earn money in order to feed our families. There is a different relationship with animals than what we are used to.

I am trying to find a way to talk myself into imaging that these horses might actually have a good life compared to other animals. They must be a prized possession and might even receive better treatment than some of the human members of the family, since they are their means to earn their living. If they do not line up early, early in the morning in front of the tourist boats with their horse carriages, they will not be able to buy food.

I can�t help thinking what it must be like to see hundreds of tourists stream out of the boats everyday with expensive cameras in their hand and dressed in shorts and T-shirts. We probably seem just as strange and �foreign� to them as they do to us.