EduBlog Insights

Following up on my previous post, here is my first rough draft for justifying Flickr. I’m moving on to Furl but wanted to post this for any reactions. I am so thankful for Derek Baird’s article on “The Promise of Social Networks.” I borrowed many, many of his well-written ideas. Thank-you Derek!

Flickr is an easy to use site that supports constructivist-based learning. It gives students the ability to access photographs of extraordinary quality. We plan to create photosets (albums) for class use. Notes can be placed directly on photos. This lends itself to a myriad of curriculum objectives that can be taught and reinforced. Tagging can be used and students ‘tag’ each photo with a label or keyword, thus learning a relevant skill that is so important in today’s world. Students learn organizing and categorizing skills, as well as more efficient and time-saving ways to search for information. Slide shows can be created. All of these subsets can be designated as public or private. Students can clearly learn copyright issues and it will be more relevant to them as the learning will be first-hand and applicable to them. It gives us a way to share our classroom work with parents and others. Projects can be worked on that simultaneously develop writing, technology and most importantly collaborative learning skills.

Another key feature is the integration of Flickr with most of the major Weblog services. As you know we have been exploring the use of weblogs with students for the past four years. Students have been recognized in national magazines and articles. Students and instructors would be able upload photographs into their Weblog with a click of the “Blog This” button. Flickr also provides RSS feeds so that students and teachers alike can syndicate their photos into their course Web logs,. RSS feeds also allow the teachers to have the student’s projects delivered directly to their aggregator, saving the teacher the time-consuming task of having to enter each student’s URL in order to view his/her work.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 9:28 am and is filed under social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.