Using Flickr

I went to a reunion last week and immediately posted my photos to Flickr, inviting the other attendees to join my group and do the same. A few people posted to Facebook despite the fact that not all class members have accounts. A few others cluttered our email inboxes with photo message attachments. No one actually posted to Flickr. I guess I needed to give them the screen recording tour first!! (Hmm...maybe I should have students create FB accounts for fictional characters to demonstrate character and text analysis skills.)

In any case, I can see uses for Flickr in the classroom: from field trips to school events, point-of-view visual rhetoric to storyboarding and a clever way to put together a slide show of some show-n-tell project or billboards of found poetry. On a field trip, different groups could become experts on a specific area of knowledge and take lots of pictures to present to the class as a whole. Or everyone could compare their visual perspective on the same content. Slide shows could be set to music or narration.

I like that students could have easy access at school or at home and that the privacy controls are conducive to the classroom setting.