Wow-every week I am learning so many new things. I had heard of Flickr and seen students using it at school, so it is great to now have a good understanding of what Flickr is all about! There are some absolutely beautiful photos on Flickr and I really enjoyed searching for different images. It was very helpful to learn how to interpret a Flickr page-how to identify the photographer, etc. It was also important to learn about copyright, attibution and creative commons photos so we can teach our students these things.
The topic that I chose for my search was cities in Israel and I learned that the tags are not always as precise as you would want them to be. Teachers at school often ask me for images of Israeli cities so I wanted to explore what was out there in the Creative Commons Flickr domain. I was thrilled to see how many beautiful photos were available. One of my favorite photos was this one of Haifa seen from the Bahai Gardens.
I was very interested in reading about uses of Flickr in relation to storytelling/story writing and poetry. I loved the term “flicktion“, where one writes a story about a Flickr image. I know that I just touched the tip of the iceberg for educational uses of Flickr. I enjoyed reading Alan Levine’s examples, such as Visual Storytelling, where you tell an entire story with 5 images, the Six Word Stories were neat as well where one had to tell a complete story about a photo in only six words. The other idea that I loved was linking photos to poetry. David Jakes has a lot of good ideas of how to use Flickr in a classroom-I enjoyed seeing how he took his favorite poem from Hawthorne and linked words in the poem to photos. I think that that is a really neat idea-having children read or create poetry, and then tie an image or images to that poem. It really helps to have visuals to portray the feeling and meaning of a poem. I can see us using Flickr to illustrate stories or poems that our children read or create in Hebrew as well.
