Flickin' through Flickr

So , I just spent about three hours flicking through pictures on Flickr. I searched places I have lived, things I like to do, places and people I talk about in my classroom. I could have kept going, but it was after midnight and I thought I should get a little sleep. If you have never used flickr here is a short overview video. My classmate also gave me some cool sites to help search, so check out search me and tag galaxy.

There are so many possibilities with this tool in a Modern Language Classroom. I can find pictures of all the countries that speak French and Spanish. There are also tools to create magazine covers, montages, and movie posters. I found one I especially liked of Marie Antoinette. Any of these could be used for a project in multiple subject areas. I imagine a montage of a historical period or endangered species and habitats or magazine covers detailing life in a country or the important contributions of an individual in history. There were poetry examples where keywords in the poem were tagged with images and I found a whole music video created with flickr images. I think this could be a time saver in many schools. Say you have multiple teachers creating presentations on ancient civilizations, what if they now created a group to share photos on that topic? The pictures would magically appear together and what one teacher finds is instantly shared with the group. I think the pictures could also be used as bell ringers. Put up a picture and ask the students what they think they are going to learn today based on the image you are projecting or as as exit card you put up the image and ask the students to write down how the image connects to the day's lesson. Fabulous!

An idea I have for my class is to have the kids create a photo gallery of the places we talk about in class on our wiki. I am also thinking of changing my Paris postcard project to a video using flicr images. Finally, I found a 365 days of flickr calendar video and I thought this would be cool for a team to do throughout the year as a photo stream and then turn it into a video at the end of the year. I even found a very basic video created by seventh graders on internet safety using pictures from Flickr.com/creativecommons. I think I could easily become a flickr fanatic!