Monday 17 August 2009

Using Flickr in the classroom

Hi everyone,

I have not been able to implement this into a classroom, so here are my ideas of how this tool could be used with Year Four students as an example.

Year Four students are studying animals and are going on an excursion to Australia Zoo. Their job is to take photos of their animal that they are studying. Once they get back to the classroom, they must upload these photos to their own Flickr account. Once they have uploaded these pictures, they are required to link them to their own wiki as a reference point for their oral presentation.

Students are also required to search the Flickr site for images relating to their animal of study. Once they have found images relating to their study topic, they will link and embed them into their wiki.

After their oral presentation, the students will respond to the following questions:
- Why did they choose those pictures?
- What makes them effective?

Also, ask the students to reflect on their process and discuss the challenges they faced and the strategies they employed to overcome these difficulties.

Reflecting upon this task, had I implemented it, the following challenges may have arisen:

- Equal sharing of the camera during the excursion. Students could possibly use personal cameras.
- Time to upload photos to Flickr. The Learning Manager could assist students in learning how to compress files to make them easier to upload through the use of a program such as Microsoft Picture Manager.
- Assist students to set up their own Flickr account. Use a data projector to show the students how to create their own account before they do it themselves.
- Scaffold students’ learning and show them how to embed and link their photos to the class blog or wiki. Use a data projector to show students how to complete this first.
- Computer access. If there are not many computers available for access, set up group rotations, making this activity a group rotation ensures all students have the opportunity to set up their account and upload photos.

The use of this technological tool relates to the ICT Learning framework (AusInfo, 2003). This framework is broken into three components:

- Learning Tasks – students are engaged in real-life authentic learning tasks
- Learning Resources – the resources necessary to complete the task
- Learning Support – scaffolding provided by the Learning Manager to assist students to complete the task.

Within this task, the students will be using all of the components of the framework. They are gathering resources for a task that is authentic and relevant to their world by taking their own photos as well as searching for other images on the Flickr site. The Learning Manager is giving the students support by scaffolding their learning to create an account, upload photos and link to blogs and wikis.

Once students have established their own account, they can also organise photos into folders, upload personal photos, and have access to these files at anytime (Yahoo7 , 2009).

Even though I did not have the opportunity to implement this idea into a classroom, I believe that it would have been an effective task for the students.

Melissa.

References

AusInfo. (2003). The Learning Design Construct. Retrieved July 24, 2009, from Learning Design: http://www.learningdesigns.uow.edu.au/project/learn_design.htm

Yahoo7 . (2009). What is Flickr? Retrieved August 1, 2009, from Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/tour/

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