Photo sharing Web sites have been around since the 90s. The conception of Flickr, now owned by Yahoo, catapulted the idea of “sharing” into a global online community. Flickr uses "tags" or keywords to help identify and search for photos.
Explore Flickr and discover what this site has to offer. Discover how tags work, what groups are, and the contributions by educators and libraries (list also here) are creating using Flickr.
When posting identifiable photos of other people, especially minors, obtain the person's permission before posting their photo in a publicly accessible place such as Flickr. Never upload other's pictures without the photographer's consent and provide credit when including photos taken by someone else in your blog.
Explore
Option 1: Explore Flickr and discover an interesting image to blog about. Include either:
- A link to the image
- If you create a Flickr account, use Flickr's blogging tool to add the image in your post.
- Include images in your post using Blogger's photo upload tool.
Option 2: For an easy challenge, create a free account in Flickr use a digital camera to capture a few pictures of something in the school library.
Upload the pictures to your Flickr account. Tag at least one of the images “Library learning2.0” and mark it public.
Create a post in your blog that includes and describes your photo and experience. Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for uploading your photo; through Flickr's blogging tool or using Blogger's photo upload feature.
Explore Further: If you are interested in looking at some photo hosting sites, check out Picasa Web Albums from Google and another service called Smugmug.
To learn about Flickr:
- Flickr Learn More Tour: A six-step tutorial
- Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
- Flickr: Popular tags Interesting - Last 7 days
- Flickr Services: 3rd party applications and mashups
- Flickr Site: Create movie posters, CD covers, magazine covers
- Libraries that Flickr or 365 Days of Library Pictures in Flickr
Connect
Teacher-librarians, educators, and students must understand the social, ethical, legal, and human issues surrounding the use of technology. Promote safe and healthy use of technology resources by modeling and teaching legal and ethical practice related Internet safety and ethics, censorship, plagiarism, and copyright.
Why consider posting images to the Web? Will Richardson, author of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, provides several convincing reasons:
- Field trips, speakers, visitors, special projects, etc. could be shared with the parents, community, and colleagues.
- Flickr's annotation tool allows students to add notes and details to parts of an image simply by dragging a box across an area and typing text into a form.
- Flickr can be a valuable tool for current events as often major photo events appear before being posed on news organizations
- Photos can be used a writing prompts, journal entries, or inquiry projects.
- Photos can be used to create visual stories - students add photos that verbalize their visualization of read text.
Reflect
Create a post in your blog that either includes your photo or a link to a photo that interested you. Describe your photo and experience.
Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for uploading your photo; through Flickr's blogging tool or using Blogger's photo upload feature.
