Ornisa's Blog

This will be my last posting about Flickr. I have taken “Virtual Museums” for my next topic. This week I will talk about Flickr in Thailand from my views and small interview; also I have provided the links to Flickr pages where teachers posted their school works and to a few lesson plans using Flickr.

My Reflection on Flickr

When I first got Flickr for my blog topic, I asked IT staff in my school about it. One of them did not know what Flickr was whereas the other two staff know that it was a kind of online picture storage. They could not state clearly though what it could do in Education. One IT staff gave a useful answer for the use of Flickr in business world. He told me that the company could present their work through Flickr and invited the customers to see it there. It is another way to showcase their work. Do I know it myself in ther first place? The answer was ‘no’. I had to do the research on this and especially what it could help us in education. I found that many teachers have tried to incorporate Flickr in their lessons. What about the teachers in my school? I went to the computer teachers first. All of them have never introduced Flickr to students and never used it. Some of them don’t know Flickr at all. For other subject teachers, I randomly checked the lesson plans and couldn’t find anybody using Flickr.

I think Flickr is not quite popular in Thailand. People use Facebook more for their social networking and photo gallery. If they do use Flickr in the education terms, mostly they do it to show their school work or for other people to keep track of the school’s events. Teachers rarely incorporate Flick into their instruction. So far as I’ve been through a good amount of uses Flickr in the classroom, I will introduce this technological tool to the teachers in my school in the school magazine. I hope that it will help add colors to their lessons and can bring any dull lessons to life.

Links to Flickr Images Relating to Classroom Ideas

• A teacher collects students’ work and presents classroom ideas on Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunna/collections/


• Classroom displays on Flickr.
  http://www.flickr.com/groups/classrmdisplays/pool/

Links to Lesson Plans Using Flickr

• Pamela AuCoin, a teacher teaching World History at Queens High School for the Sciences at York College in New York talks about incorporating Flickr in her lesson ‘Propaganda during the Russian Revolution’. Students search for images, post them onto Flickr and then exchange comments relating to the topic. Ms. Aucoin gives a clear steps for the class. See http://www.teachersnetwork.org/ntny/nychelp/technology/flickr.htm


• A teacher assigns students to use Flickr to record observations of the life cycle of a plant. Click here for a complete lesson plan for the class.

Pros:

• Flickr has the ability to promote motivation to learn in students. This is because it is not originally developed as an education tool. Students will feel more relaxed when learning with Flickr.


• Flickr as one of the social networking technologies can foster interaction and communication among learners. It will especially play an important role in online learning courses where students may have limited time or distance barrier for face-to-face interaction. Flickr can be a tool for students to build a network with their peers through photo sharing and commenting. Photos also reflect experiences so the site is where people exchange experiences. Flickr then builds a sense of community.


• Besides a network among peers, students can tie with a community of expert or amateur enthusiasts. Students are exposed to professional experiences.

Cons:

• Flickr is not censored. Instructor should give advice on inappropriate images to students especially young learners.


• As Flickr contains a myriad of photos and people set the names of their albums or photostreams at will, searching for the right images on Flickr may be time-consuming and tedious.


• Like in other vast online information sources, students may be distracted easily from the learning goals by wandering the photo sets which are not related to the learning topics.


• Some of the pictures on Flickr are copyrighted so they cannot be downloaded to be used in other settings.

Below are the sites where people expressed their experience in using Flickr. Check out what they said and you will see more of its benefits and disadvantages from their views.

A student's reflection on her practicum to present a library on Flickrhttp://classes.tametheweb.com/librarybug/category/practicum/

A teacher shared his experience on using Flickr in classrooms. The presentation is on the slideshow. http://www.slideshare.net/michaelc/teaching-with-flickr-presentation

See example 6 “Have students post images they have created to Flickr” on this page. http://cit.duke.edu/services/consult/web20casestudies.html

References:

7 things you should know about…Flickr from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7034.pdf

The Promise of Social Networks By Derek E Baird, November 1, 2005 http://www.techlearning.com/article/4816

• During an online synchronous class, the instructor uses the Photostream feature as an alternative to a PowerPoint presentation. After the class, the Photoset is available for asynchronous viewing at the student’s leisure.


• A student in a historic preservation takes a walking tour of a historic district and takes photographs of various architectural elements. These photos are organized into a Photoset and then viewed in a Flickr generated slideshow during an oral report to his class. He later uses them as a reference resource for his coursework.


• A botany graduate student on a field research expedition takes photographs of different types of plant life found in the jungles of Costa Rica, and then includes these as photo illustrations in her written report and/or research web log. As a graduate teaching assistant, she holds an online help session in FlickrLive (IM) and uses her photosets as reference material for her students.


• An American Studies professor travels to Walden Pond during the summer and uploads his pictures to Flickr. The photographs provide his students with visual context and imagery for the places discussed by Thoreau. This example could work equally as well in the history, science, or foreign language classroom, and allows the student to make asynchronous connections to the content being taught in the classroom.


• After a field trip to a living history museum, student groups write a summary of their trip in a blog and use Flickr to illustrate their report. They are able to augment their own photos with relevant images found by searching tags in the global Flickr community archives. As they work on the project they are simultaneously developing writing, technology, photography, as most importantly collaborative learning skills.


• A foreign language teacher posts pictures from her travels in France, and provides descriptions of the local color, landscape, and architecture. Students are also able to practice their burgeoning language skills by leaving comments and notes on photographs in French, thereby putting their use of language in a situated context. Students form a private group in Flickr, search the global archives for photos tagged “France”, “Eiffel Tower”, or “Paris” and then discuss (in French) interesting or relevant photographs in FlickrLive.


• An online instructor scans diagrams, charts, or other materials and then posts them using Flickr directly into the course blog or newsgroup. By sharing the URL of a specific picture it can be used as an e-handout during a synchronous course lecture.

Taken from The Promise of Social Networks by Derek E Baird, November 1, 2005

http://www.techlearning.com/article/4816

Check out this SlideShare Presentation: