A Lesson in Flickr

Flickr boasts itself as “almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world” and has two main goals:

• to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them


• to enable new ways of organizing photos

The user-friendly, fun, and social website gives this overview:

You can use Flickr to:

Organize your photos in a meaningful way
Share your photos and stay in touch with your friends and family
Form a group for a wedding, reunion and event
Find beautiful, cool or intriguing photos
And much, much more!

The much, much more part is a way understatement! Wow, just check out the Explore page then take the tour. You’ll see the cool things that are going on and continually being developed at the Yahoo-owned site. And here’s an interesting article on how Flickr got its start.

So how can this site be used in the classroom? Here’s a few ideas:

*single image writing prompt
*collaborative story writing based on an image
*digital storytelling project
*creating slides shows within Flickr
*virtual field trips
*visual debates
*illustrating poetry
*geotagging images
*visual documentation of school events
*visual documentation of student artwork and school projects
*creation of digital visual portfolios
*teach about social software: how to tag, how to make comments
*teach about the intellectual property using Flickr Creative Commons licensing
*motivational posters, movie posters, mosaics

My inspiration came from this wonderfully comprehensive site. Thanks dj.

And lastly, I've included in this post one photo of the billions in Flickr. The search possibilities are infinite, so I chose “snow” for starters, then “snow landscapes,” and when I saw this photo, I was awestruck by its surreal beauty. Someday maybe I’ll see Mt. Rainer in real time, but for now Flickr will do.

Image citation: dherrera (2006, July 20) dherrera 96’s photostream. Retreived November 19, 2007 from http://www.flickr.com/photos/56181704@N00/472809315/