flickr

Flickr is Yahoo's online photo and video management and sharing application. Flickr allows you to upload your photos in various ways like from your desktop or phone. You can edit your pictures, organize them into sets and collections, and share your photos. There are different privacy settings so you can determine who can see your photos and videos. Once you have uploaded your photos and videos, you can make things like cards, books, etc. You can also get updates from family and friends. Flickr has a map where images can be geotagged. Using the map feature, you can share where your photos and videos were taken and see photos and videos taken near a specified location.

Flickr could be used in the classroom in many ways. It could be used for digital storytelling, creating slide shows with images from flickr, for illustrating projects (especially using the creative commons search for getting copyright friendly images), for geotagging images, for creating digital portfolios of students' work, and as a kind of virtual field trip where students search images from an area that they are studying. Flickr is also an easy way to share students' work with parents. Digital portfolios or images from school events (if allowed) could be share with school families. If the school created a group, then access could be limited to those in the group, protecting the privacy of students. Guest passes can also be issued to allow one-time access to private photos.

If students were engaged in a telecollaborative project, they could use flickr to share images and video. They could also put their images into a slide show or create a digital story to introduce themselves or to share what they have learned. Flickr allows you to set up groups and specify the privacy level (public, public invite only, or private). Teachers could easily set up a group and have their photos/videos be restricted to the members of the group. Groups even have a discussion board for communicating with others in the group. Flickr allows users to insert notes directly on the image (when you mouse over it) and comments below the images. Students could use these tools to share further information about pictures or to discuss the pictures after others view them.

Some additional uses of flickr in the classroom include

• Bubblr-a tool to create comic strips using photos from flickr. You can search flickr then add the bubbles for text.
• Bookr -a tool to create and share your own photobook using flickr images.
• Phrasr-type in a phrase a phrasr will find flickr images to match your phrase. I can see this being useful with similes and metaphors or idioms.