I was first introduced to Flicker at the MACUL conference last year and I was amazed at how wonderful it was! I was excited to learn more about it and share it with others. I also began thinking of the ways that I could use this in my classroom. I really think that for Social Studies and Science flicker could be a great added resource for the students to visit. It would be very helpful for example for students who were doing a report on Michigan or China. Students could use this site to find several differnt photos to put into a slideshow or powerpoint. It could also be used to upload photos to share at an open house to promote your school.
Some pitfalls of this program could be that the teacher will not always know all the photos that will come up for that topic. Teachers would have to pre-search or assist students. The teachers would also have to monitor that the students were keeping their photos private if they were uploading any.
This could be an excellent site for both students and teachers and I look forward to using it in my classroom!
Kristine, you are right about flickr being a great resource for students to use when doing reports or presentations. I have yet to post links to my classroom wiki where students can go to get photos for projects. I want to post some of the links that Jim has offered onto my wiki (with his permission of course) and then maybe we can collaborate together to come up with a list that we can both share on our wikispaces for students to use. Have you had your fourth graders cite their sources for photos used? I am still working on trying to show the fifth grade how to do this the correct way. Again, maybe another project we can do together with both of our classes?
ReplyDeleteFlickr is a great example of the risk-reward nature of Web 2.0. It's a great resource IF you can prevent the inappropriate content from popping up on screen. Although the school filter can help, it's not 100% foolproof. I remember a few years ago when a student was searching for "crustacean" on Google images. Let's just say something related to crabs came up that looked NOTHING like a crustacean (and Google images was set to strict filtering!).
ReplyDeleteSo yes, as the teacher, you have to be vigilent, and closely monitor what the students are viewing on their screens.
I think you are wise to conduct a pre-search on Flickr for the keywords the students would be using when conducting their own search, just to prevent any surprises.