Images with Flickr

Hi all,

I was playing around with Flickr for awhile without realising that I was getting way too distracted and needed to get back to work. For those of you who have not yet used this tool, Flickr is a place where you can store, sought, search and share your very own photos. It offers a place for you to accumulate your photos and create stories with them (Flickr, 2009). 'Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application. Its primary goals are to help people make photos available to those who matter to them, and to enable new ways of organizing pictures (O'Reilly, 2009).'

Whilst playing around with Flickr, I realised just how many uses this tool has. I love photography, so this website allowed me to play around with some of my favourite photos. I uploaded some photos of my family and friends. It was then that the fun began; I had colour changes, vision changes and even focal changes. It was here that I realised the potential of this e.learning tool. The students in my class have just returned from camp, and one of their assessment tasks is to create a photo story. I believe that this would be a great tool to use in the classroom for my students to use as a basis for the content of images for their photo story.

My issue was that this site allows users to share photos throughout the site and it got me thinking that this may not be safe to use in the classroom because of privacy acts and copyright acts. I did a little more research about the privacy of this site and realised that when signing up to Flickr, users have the option of setting their profile to private, blocking public access. This allows teachers to let students have access to the sites with parental permission (due to sourcing others images). If I were to just create an account on behalf of the class, I would still need parental permission to display, store and share the images.

The use of Flickr in the classroom.

Flickr is a great tool to put forward to the students. It allows all learners to advance their ICT skills and use digital cameras to capture their learning experiences and reflect on their learning’s. If the students were to complete science experiments, they could have many photos of each step they took to create the experiment and then create a photo story to reflect on their learning’s. Students could also create photo stories before activities are done using photos on the internet to predict outcomes. Not only could the students use this for science, but across all learning areas.

Learning Managers need to watch out that the students are on safe sites when accessing photos to ensure their net safety is at high priority at all times. Early childhood students could also use Flickr with assistance from parents and teachers to upload photos for show and tell and to save photos of different animals or surroundings corresponding to the learning activities they are completing in class.

Overall, Flickr is a great tool to use for manipulating, storing and sourcing images, but the privacy issues do scare me a little. I have used Corel before and Photoshop and both I found very easy to use, without the stress of safe use in the classroom. I am still a little undecided. Let me know what you think!

Until next time,
Amy

References:

Flickr (2009). General Flickr Questions. Viewed on 12/08/09 from:
http://www.flickr.com/help/general/

O’Reilly, N. (2009) What is Flickr? Viewed on 12/08/09 from:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2005/08/02/flickr.html