Fun With Flickr

Flickr has a lot of potential use in an educational setting.  For basic reasons, I would love to use flickr for communicating with parents or my school district by showing them what my classroom is learning about.  Going off this idea, to build further relationships with my students, it would be neat to always look at pictures they may post in the future or over summer break.  When using flickr in my classroom, though, I feel that the features that I would use could easily be done by a smartboard.   I feel that there is an overlap between some of the technologies and that I could just use one or two to fulfill all the things I could if I used all of them.  The smartboard could easily have students identify different parts of objects or the like, but the only reason flickr is more effective is because it actually has the content on it.  As a teacher, I would probably just paste pictures from it onto the smartboard and integrate it into a lesson from there.   Photography, however, is becoming more and more prominent in our society.  Many people are becoming their photographers and taking pictures.  It is becoming an important part of people’s communications.  I feel that it would be a fun topic for students to learn about and it would be something that they use for the rest of their lives.

  As a future educator, I will use flickr in my classroom.  I think that it provides a great opportunity for visual learners to participate more and take more from the lesson.  I also think that it will simply motivate the students in general because who wouldn’t love looking at pictures, instead of reading a textbook all day?  I am excited to use flickr in social studies to give more meaning behind the text and keep up on current events.  I think it would be a great learning experience to actually see what is happening in the world.  Students will take more away from it because it is a vicarious experience and they can relate it to.  This is especially easy because with tag words I can quickly type in an event that occurred and find lots of photos that weren’t published in papers and may tell a different side to the stories.  In a science class, it would be an excellent way to test students on parts of the body, for example.  The chapter also gave an example of how the students had to write a story about one of the pictures, which is another great idea.  Besides all the specific subjects flickr could be used for, it would be another tool for students to do research on.  They can use the pictures to analyze different topics and it could help them get their message across because a picture can say a million words.