Flickr in education

I have been exploring Flickr, and I find it to be a great site for connecting with others visually. I noticed a lot of the photos in the education area had pictures of the actual students, and when you are teaching special education, that is not possible, as it breaks privacy laws. You can get permission from parents to share, but I personally would not feel comfortable with this, as they are on the internet, and even though they say it is private, I am not so sure.

Other than that I think that it is good for things like lesson sharing, as you can take pictures of fun activities you did and create groups so that other can share their ideas also. I think it is nice that you can connect with teachers all over the world, and quite possibly, there is no end to the ideas that could stem from that collaboration.

Also, another idea is to have the students themselves take pictures and then create their own flickr pages and creative projects that match their own interests. You could link these projects with various standards depending what your topic and projects were. Flickr would definately meet internation technology standards. Flickr has other websites that can connect with it and you can then use the pictures you have stored in Flickr to create other projects. I was working with Big Huge Labs checking out the photo mosaics. An idea I had for my classroom, as I am teaching nouns and how to answer "wh" questions, was to make a photo mosaic of one type of noun and have the students then answer questions about the pictures. So, for example, if I wanted to work on "people" I could have a mosaic made of various people and ask the studens "who" questions about them all. I could also have them tell me which "wh" question goes along with "people". I could then do this for each theme we were working with, and eventually the same thing when we begin focusing on verbs. Once they were used to the process they could make their own posters using these applications.

Therefore, I think that using Flickr is a tool that could be useful for various creative projects by the students, and for connecting with other educators regarding events, activities and other ideas.