Photosharing Possibilities

Mecatina School Library, originally uploaded by Tadaa!1.

Photo taking had always been an enjoyable pastime of mine... a means of holding onto memories, creatively organizing photos in an album to share with family and friends... but somewhere, somehow, fewer pictures were being taken. Was it a question of lack of time? Fewer photo opportunities? The onset of digital cameras? Who knows. But the thoughts of simply downloading reams of pictures onto the computer and storing them there did not appeal to me. Had I taken the time, however, to explore tools such as Flickr, perhaps I would have arrived to this place sooner...

But here I am. As presented in Web 2.0 for Schools (Davies and Merchant, 2009), Flickr is a site for storing and sharing images, but also has many other key features that provide opportunities for both formal and informal learning (p. 36). One idea that stood out for me was that of a Science project where students took photographs to document plant growth, from seed to flower (p. 37). With the ‘organization’ feature on Flickr, the students were able to compare the growth habits of various flowers. And with the ‘annotation’ feature, they were able to add descriptive notes to the images themselves, which illustrated specific changes to parts of the flower. (Tried annotating the library photo but wasn't able to share it with you on this blog). Reflecting on a project my students have done, when building a model of the setting within a story, they could now take a photograph and annotate the different parts of their model.

Flickr also led me to discover Smilebox, which is another tool I was not familiar with. Although it took a few trial runs before I was able to master (?) this slideshow tool, I gained more confidence and became more creative as I went. Although I see this as a means of organizing and sharing my own personal projects, I can see where the slideshows, for example, may provide students with another choice as a presentation tool. It would tie in nicely as a media project as well!

Other than technological and transference glitches, I was very impressed with the capabilities these tools have to offer. Now comes the age old problem of time management... to investigate the tools’ possibilities even further!