FLICKR AS AN ONLINE EDUCATION

Flickr is one of the many photo sharing sites offering free and paid access to an online storage for your photos. Other similar services include Picasa Web Albums, PhotoBucket, SnapFish and Blipfoto.

Most photo sharing sites are free to start with, offering a basic account with limited storage space but allows you to buy extra storage at a reasonable rate when you need it. So how does one use a photo sharing site to facilitate teaching and learning?

What is Photo Sharing?

Most photo sharing sites not only offer a way of hosting your photos online, but the ability to create photo galleries and albums as well as tools to edit your photos online.

Apart from being able to publish the photos on the world wide web, most photo sharing sites also allow the student to manage their photos and make them private.

Student can then choose to share private albums by invitation only, giving a secure way to share photos with people they choose.

However, if student choose, student can make their photos public, add meta tags or keywords, provide more information about the photo in the description and tag the people in the photo.

Student can also geotag the photos to provide geographical information or location details of where the photos were taken.

This allows the photos to be visible to search engines and searches performed on the photo sharing site. Members of the photo sharing site can also add comments, rate the photos and and label them as favourites.

Each member will also have a profile page where they can provide more information about themselves.

So Might Flickr be Used in Schools?

First, sign up for a Flickr account and start uploading the photos. Student may wish to group their photos together according to events or topic and create separate sets or albums for each collection.

18 Ways with Flickr for Education

• Link this to the school’s website or your blog. Most websites are now based on some form of Content Management Systems (CMS) that will support widgets for Flickr. You can add Flickr widgets to showcase activities, events, artwork, prize winners or school facilities to name a few.

• Events and Activities – upload photos of staff and students working together during an event or activity. This could be a sports, field trip, seminar or workshop help in the school.

• Proof of Work – upload images of artwork, work pieces from product design, science experiment outcomes, wood working results, crafts, electronic projects, product prototypes, textile and fashion design, dishes from budding chefs, end products from team building exercises and more.

• Drama and Music – put together collections of photos of the musicians, actors and actresses whom have performed in school plays, musical recitals or charity events.

• Identify and Record – images of the different species of plants, animals, insects, fishes. Set an assignment using a mixed collection of images and ask your students to classify and list them according to the groups they learnt.

• Art and the Artist – similar to the above, identify from the artwork, the artist that created it. This can also be an exercise to match artwork to the era of which they existed or upload images of artwork and ask students to be art critics and add their comments under each photos.

• Products and Designers – again, similar to the above, match iconic designs with their designers

• Humanities – you could do the same for Geography, History and Religious Education with matching games as assignments, historical events or place, with screenshots from Google Earth to talk about the river systems, highlands, continents. Natural phenomenons and its impact on people.

• Presentation – provide students with suitable images for their presentation or project. They can also search on Flickr for other images to make their presentations more exciting. But be sure to educate them on the different licenses and copyright restrictions and ask them to use only images classed under creative commons with attribution where applicable.

• Story Telling and Creative Writing – for English, Literature or any other subject, a group of photos can be a story board that allows students to compose their own story or creative ‘journalism’

• Image Portfolios – encourage students to create their own image portfolios. This can be their artwork, crafts, textile, writing, outputs from their design and technology classes.

• Raise Awareness – using images to raise current issues such as global warming, pollution, extinction.

• Lesson Resource – using the slideshow option on Flickr, present your topic in an interesting and engaging way with suitable images

• Research Projects – use images from Flickr to include as part of student’s research assignment and projects. Again be mindful of licenses and copyrights

• Intellectual Property Awareness – explain to students the importance of intellectual property and the different licences that an image can be classed under as well as how these can be applied to the way they use the images.

• Explore the world – use Flickr Map to explore images from different parts of the world. Flickr Map functions pretty much like Google Maps with options to zoom in on a particular location, view in satellite, map or hybrid mode.

• Collaborative and Group Working – Create various groups to upload photos to and assign students to work collaboratively to cover certain topics and encourage them to comment on each others collection.

• Search by Groups – is a great way to zone in and be on topic with your image searches. Members joining a group contribute to the group with images relevant to the theme or title of the group. These images are collectively pooled together also known as Group Pool and can be a fun way to explore.

Here is how using flickr as an online classroom

Let grab it....:)