06.29.08
Thing 11 – Flickr Frenzy
What I Like About Flickr:
- Tagging; one photo can serve many purposes (i.e. winter, snow, cold, beautiful, outdoors, etc.).
- You can associate photos with locations on a map; this would be great for classroom geotours, fun spring break or summer vacation assignments, etc.
- You can set the photos you upload to a private or public setting.
- You can send photos directly to a blog or a del.icio.us page.
- There are millions of Creative Commons photos for classroom use.
- I didn’t run across one inappropriate photo in the two hours that I played on site.
- You can comment on and tag others’ photos.
- CDs and DVDs eventually corrupt; Flickr is a great way to store precious memories in a safe place.
- I can upload photos to my Flickr account from my cell phone and even through email.
What I’m Getting Used to
- Flickr doesn’t support posting directly to an Edublogs blog (at least when I tried to; can someone prove me wrong?)
- Tagging can be tough because it’s entirely subjective; what I tag as “trash” might be tagged as “paper” by someone else. This makes searching interesting.
- With a free account, I am only allowed 100MB of upload space per month; I can upgrade to a pro account for $25 for a year or $48 for 2 years. With all the free Web 2.0 tools out there, I am resistant to spend any money..
For some reason, grammatical and spelling errors seem to jump out at me as I float through my daily life. I find them in the books I read, hear them on the radio, see them on billboards, and find them in restaurant menus. These kinds of errors irritate me and I think people should be more careful about the text that they make public (I have my fingers crossed that I’ve done a good job editing previous posts!) So, in true editor form, I searched through the Creative Commons section of Flickr for photos documenting misspellings seen out and about in the world. It was amazing what showed up! There was even a group pool of photos labeled “Public Spelling Errors.” Can you see the error “set in stone” in the photo below?
I thought it might be fun to encourage a group of students to experiment with digital cameras in a similar way sometime next year. Some questions we might investigate could be: How many errors are we able to find in the world? Where do the most errors appear? What are the most common errors we find? What do these errors say about us? What are the implications of such errors? Why is careful editing so important? It would be interesting to post our findings on a class wiki and solicit responses from our parents, other teachers, or students in our school. I’m excited about the possibilities!
photo by sylvar
June 10, 2009 at 11:58 am
[...] In a previous post, I commented on an idea I had for incorporating flickr into classroom teaching. My idea involved [...]