Photo Sharing with Flickr (a.k.a. my latest addiction)

What my brain’s been doing lately - reflections on the learning process

Before this assignment I had heard of Flickr, looked at Picasa and had created a few shows on PhotoPeach. Yes, we take pictures in our household. I’m actually a bit of a closet photographer, having taken a photography course at university back when special effects were things we did manually with the camera or while we developed our prints in a dark room. I certainly haven’t kept up with the digital revolution. We use Photolab to download, store and order prints. I’d never bothered to look at photo sharing sites in depth. As I attempted to scale this mountain of new learning (okay, really I’m just trying to find the first hand-hold), I find myself thrilled, excited and terrified all at the same time.  Thrilled at the prospect of learning something new, terrified that I just won’t ‘get it’, and excited when something that’s been unclear to me suddenly works and my confidence with the tool builds.

I was excited to see that Will Richardson recommends Flickr as "the Web-based digital photography portal of choice for many educators” (Richardson, 2010, p. 102). With that in mind I checked and was thrilled to find out that the site was not blocked by our school board’s filters and so it is accessible at work. To begin, I read. Did you know that when you Google Flickr you get 424,000,00 results? Then, I began to play. I took the tour, signed up, browsed, uploaded a few pictures and joined a few groups. Truly, I’ve had a lot of fun and have found it quite compelling. It’s been like getting lost in a maze. As I discover something, it leads me somewhere else. I’d still be walking in circles if it weren’t for the many websites and blogs offering support and guidance, e.g.  http://www.jakesonline.org/flickrsites.htm ,  http://flickrring.blogspot.com/ http://mashable.com/2007/08/04/flickr-toolbox/   . At the moment I could easily have a few weeks off (who am I kidding – months!) to simply continue exploring, connecting and creating.

Dogs, hockey and a shoe fetish - using Flickr in my personal life

It seemed obvious that this was a place where I could organize my photographs, tag them and describe them. My first discovery as to why I should be organizing my material here, instead of my basic Photolab, was the ability to be part of a community through the group feature. I was having a great time searching personal interests and hobbies and found all kinds of groups that I'd be happy to share pictures with, e.g. Dogs named 'Daisy', a group from my city of Brampton, and groups for gardening, hockey, North American birds, and so forth. I looked through many pictures and photostreams. I even created my own group, Schnauzer-Jack Russell crosses and will be interested to see if in a few months there are any other members. I read some of the funny comments in the discussions but found many of them finished, e.g. posted 6 months ago. I needed something to really connect to.  I was sold on Flickr the second I discovered the group for 'Librarian Shoes'! Truly, how could I resist sharing my back to school shoes, my pirate-princess shoes and my fabulous gold lame wedges (a favorite with the Kindergarten girls) purchased a few years ago in Rome during the summer shoe sales.  Now I’m really intrigued and will participate in this group quite actively.

Pirate - princess shoes!

Back to school shoes!

Even Barbie couldn't resist these!

I also realized that with Flickr, here was a place where I could share photos with family and friends around the world, create shows, screensavers and using some of the tools, send items like ‘framed’ photos and cards, e.g. http://bighugelabs.com/frame.php.

I wasn’t sure if there was much more I would do with Flickr in my personal life. While I was checking out our local minor hockey association’s website this week, I discovered that they are looking for suggestions for a new logo. In the past, I would have drawn my ideas by hand using a combination of pen and marker. Since I’d been investigating tools for school use, I’d discovered Flickr logo makr, http://flickr.nosv.org/ . Here was a starting point for helping to design their new logo. Surely using one of the images available in the hockey group along with this logo tool, I could come up with something. Then, I discovered Spell with Flickr, http://metaatem.net/words/ . The variety of fonts and styles available is outstanding and I like having the ability to change each individual letter. Now I can incorporate the league’s traditional colours, along with some unique lettering and an image. Hopefully, someone in the hockey community has a bit more technical skill with this and will help out. And so, the personal uses of Flickr continue to grow.

Exploring the maze – using Flickr in my professional life

If getting to know Flickr is like getting lost in a maze, then considering its’ professional uses is like turning a corner to explore new twists and turns which of course lead to more twists and turns.
Once I was used to the basics, I began to play around in the ‘apps garden’. As I explored, I was thinking about how would I use this as a classroom teacher, as a teacher-librarian and would I have students use this, and if so how and for what? Is there a use for this within my professional learning communities? What kind of instruction and professional development will need to happen? Are there ways for all of these groups to be both consumers and producers?
The answer of course is yes! We need to equip our classes with digital cameras and start right in Kindergarten. At the most basic level it’s a place for teachers and students to contribute their own pictures and find images for units, e.g. habitats, animals, ancient civilizations. No longer do I need to provide old National Geographic’s for cutting out images. When I began exploring Flickr, I began to save habitat pictures to create a show for our grade four teachers and really couldn’t see how this was any different from using Google images. Then I realized that because of Flickr’s amazing search features I could search by a keyword or tag, e.g. rainforest, restrict the search to images within the creative commons and from the ‘view’ menu click slideshow and the work is done for me in seconds. Why would I waste my time importing pictures to PowerPoint when I can achieve these amazing results in a few seconds?
For the kindergarten to grade five setting there are many usable suggestions for uses of individual images, e.g. deconstructing an image, as story prompts, and to stimulate descriptive writing. Similarly, I can see our students using the annotation tool to develop scientific diagrams, e.g. parts of a plant, character maps e.g. Little Red Riding Hood or to illustrate vocabulary, e.g. feelings.  One of the first things I tried was adding notes to some images of my library.  Next year's orientation show will look
quite different. 
Geotagging, could be useful in many ways, e.g. celebrations around the world, ancient civilizations, Canadian provinces and land regions, tracking a real person like Henry Hudson’s movements and tracking a fictional character like Flat Stanley or Waldo’s movements. I can see this being a favorite. Using multiple images we’ll have records of real trips, performances, speakers, and projects. We’ll also have virtual trips, storyboards and student photo-journalists reporting on school, community and current events.
As teacher-librarian I’m thrilled that there is a creative commons library. This is a great way for me to illustrate intellectual property rights. The fact that students can attribute rights to their own images will help make a tough concept much clearer. I’m also thinking students could use images to create book posters for new releases and our upcoming Silver Birch program. The list is really endless.
I’ve asked on our teacher-librarian discussion page if anyone has been using Flickr and so far I’ve had no response. So, do I begin with PD for other teacher-librarians? Do I offer a workshop for my staff? Since our students are young, I’m inclined to offer an after-hours workshop for parents. I’m also inclined to stick with what seems to work with my colleagues by choosing one or two keen teachers per grade and modeling the use of Flickr for them and their students.

Final thoughts before my brain explodes

Truly, I’m not even close to getting out of the maze. There are a few things I’ve discovered though that will stay with me. First, Flickr is incredibly easy to use. It’s convenient for storing images and publishing them. The ability to create presentations and slide shows, tag images, annotate images with notes, associate images with geographic locations and the huge number of extra applications available is simply outstanding. Personally, I’m sold. Professionally, well, I’m sold too, but as always there are some concerns. For the three to eleven year old, do we have their teacher set up a class account? Who can access it and how? Should the older children have their own accounts? Obviously, the ability to mark photos as private will be necessary in many cases. As always, how to we supervise this and what do we do about e-mail accounts for kids? For use at work, the 100mb and two video per month limit, will simply not be enough and we’ll have to move up to a pro account. Once we solve these issues we have a mountain of features to explore and educational uses to discover.
After I’ve played a bit and feel comfortable creating the products suggested above there is still more to explore. I’d like to consider how to use Flickr with students to create digital portfolios. With the multitude of free apps that let us create highly motivating items like magazine covers and trading cards, student interest will be immediate. Flickr can be the doorway to more uses for digital images as well as ways to get students publishing and collaborating. We might even have to start with a show about shoes that come to school!

References
Richardson, Will. (2010). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.