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.

Top Ten List for Educational Video-Clips

Here is another list as promised. I wanted to point out my Top Ten Videos of 2007. I have placed these in my favorites on YouTube and have used them in the classroom with my elementary school students or with teachers during professional development opportunities. Here they are in NO particular order.

1. A Vision of Students today
   Created by an Anthropology teacher and his class from the Kansas State University. Very powerful message on how students are (learn) different than their teachers (teach).
   
2. A Vision of K-12 Students Today
   A clip based on the previous title, using a range of students from elementary, middle and high school. Very effective when talking to K-12 educators. No excuse, that the change in the way kids learn and are communicating does not affect their school level.
   
   
3. Pay Attention
   I have shown this video to fellow teachers during Pre-Planning. It set the tone for the changes we had planned technology integration wise. The video clip helped them see that we simply could not continue the way we had before.
   

4. Stuck on an Escalator
   Commercial, but highly effective when showing teachers AND students. The video shows two people getting stuck on an escalator, too afraid of taking the next step by themselves. I have discussed the use of this clip in my classroom on a previous post “The Power of Playing ”
   
5. Everyone knows your Name
   I have shown this video clip to 5th and 6th graders in an attempt to open up their eyes to the consequences of their online lives. The clip is a great starting point for discussion and one of the three excellent clips about Internet Safety and Cyberbullying.
   
6. Talent Show
   This is the second of three video clips I show my elementary school students and also their parents when talking about Internet Safety and prevention of Cyberbullying. A pre-teen girl steps up on stage at a talent show and publicly harasses another girl that is sitting in the audience. The point of this video is to show how in real life kids see classmates getting bullied (not as openly as in the video on stage), but they still don’t do anything about it. It shows the need for them to stand up united against bullying.
   
7. Cyberbullying- In the Kitchen
   The third in the series is about teenagers sitting in the kitchen with the mother in the background. The group of teenagers talk openly around the kitchen table, similar to the way they communicate via text messages and through social network places like MySpace . The way how the mother and others are witnesses to foul language and harassment might not be as obvious to the teenagers as if it is done digitally.
   
8. Dove Commercial
   This commercial is a great reminder that all of us have to be alert and learn how to be media savvy. Technology has blurred the boundaries of what looks real and what is real or not. It is part of being literate today to know how to recognize and evaluate different types of media.
   

9. Introducing the Book
   This list would not be complete without the hilarious clip of the medieval “help desk”. It was a wonderful ice breaker during pre-planning this year, reminding everybody that “Jeder Anfang ist schwer”, which is German for “Every beginning is hard”. Learning how to read a book, how to turn pages, how to open and close it, was just as hard for someone back then as it is for some to get used to a new media today. The moral of the story is, that in a few hundred years from now, it will be extremely funny to think that there were people around who did not know how to open and close a digital document.

10. Did you know 2.0?
    The updated version from June 2007 of Karl Fish’s original slideshow. What an amazing and powerful video. No further comment needed. Just sit back and watch.