If a picture is worth a thousand words...

Hi all,

Well, after having signed up for and played with Picasa and Flickr. I think I prefer Flickr, however. It is more user-friendly, easier to navigate and I already have some experience with it as friends use it. I checked out Webshots, which seems quite easy to navigate as well. However, I would not recommend photobucket as the layout is too text-heavy and not visual enough. This struck me as odd, since it is a photo sharing website and the home page had NO IMAGES! So, it's back to Flickr, for this photo sharing newbie! Plus, I am have been somewhat influenced by Will Richardson and his overwhelming support for Flickr. Check out my photos from our day camp here.

There are lots of good ideas from David Jake's blog: The Strength of Weak Ties. It is so informative, that I have signed up for it. If you haven't checked it out, I recommend it.So, how can sites like Flickr help me in my work? For starters, I can search images using tags - excellent for research projects and Power Point Presentations. I also thought that the suggestions for illustrating poetry were brilliant! Imagine the possibilities. As a social studies teacher, I definitely would be able to use the geo-tagging function in Flickr to teach geography. Wow, and I thought Google earth was out of this world for social studies. As a second language teacher, there are a tremendous number of possibilities in using photo prompts to generate discussion, debate and writing. No more searching through books, clip art, or Google images to find that perfect picture. Plus, the quality of photos on photo sharing sites is remarkably good and not what I expected.

As for student photos, I see potential with being able to share photos of field trips. We just took our grade nine French immersion students on a one day team building trip to a YMCA camp. We could have everyone that took photos to send them into Flickr and tag them in a similar way. Another great application would be to upload images of our France and Québec exchange students and their partners from our school. This would be a great promotional tool for encouraging future students to participate in the exchange. As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words” Then, the link to the photo sharing site could then be included on our department web page on the school web site. Therefore, we could change the photos on Flickr while maintaining the link – therefore not requiring the webmaster to constantly be updating the photos. As well, putting up a link is so much easier than managing photos on a website.

Whew! I had some problems linking my Flickr photos to my blog, but I think I may have figured it out. I still can't seem to link the slideshow function from Flickr to my blog. I see though, that it can be done. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Over and out!