Sharing the Addiction

Today I put the finishing touches on my resource page on Flickr for teachers on my wiki.  I have included a number of ways that you can use Flickr in an educational context as well as links to tutorials and other tools that can work with Flickr. I am going to put a very brief summary here of some of the types of examples so it would pay to check out the wiki page to see an in-depth coverage of this topic.

Flickr to Share what is happening in the classroom

This is the most basic use for Flickr. Upload pictures of activities, displays or examples of work for others to view and to share ideas.

Use the Note Feature in Flickr for Interactivity

Flickr has the ability to add notes to parts of your image that will open in a pop-up window when you mouse over the area where you have placed the note. This can be used to ‘embed’ writing and information into your images. The only disadvantage is that the pop-up note feature only functions within Flickr itself and you can’t embed the images into a wiki or blog and maintain the notes. It is easy enough to have a link to the Flickr page however. The example to the left shows using this to create an online and interactive mihi (information about your background and heritage for non-New Zealanders). It can also be used for labeling, instructional writing or having information about each child within a group picture. It would be great if you could leave a comment on this blog post with other ways you might use this.

Using Flickr for Digital Storytelling

There are groups on Flickr where people submit photos that tell stories in 5 photographic frames. A New Zealand teacher with the Flickr username Hey Milly has created a group specifically for children to post their photo stories to and the example below was on this Flickr group.

 Using Flickr to Learn About Other Places

There is a map tool on Flickr that allows you to save images from your Flickr photostream into locations on a world map. This is not only handy for when you travel but can be great if you want to find images from other parts of the world if you are learning about them in class. You can ask to see the results on the map from everyone’s images and can then use pictures from these places.

Using Flickr as a Storage Site that Works with Other Tools

Flickr released to the public what is called its API. Other online tool developers where then able to use this to allow you to build connections between your account with them and your Flickr account. This saves you uploading the same pictures into all the different tools. An example of this is Big Huge Labs where you can make your Flickr photos into all kinds of things such as the motivational poster on the right.

Searching Flickr

Many people who upload their photos to Flickr make them public and apply a Creative Commons license to them meaning that you are legally able to use them as long as you cite your source. There are tools to search for these type of pictures in Flickr with search engines such as CompFight, Flickr Storm and FlickRiver.  You can also use the advanced search options within Flickr to do a Creative Commons search. See the wiki page for more detailed information on Flickr searches.

There are tutorials and more examples within each category on the wiki page. Enjoy using Flickr!

Tags: flickr, photos

I know that most people already know about Big Huge Labs but I thought I’d remind people about it again. I had fun this morning making a motivational poster out of one of my photos from Vietnam. I really must get to using this with kids!

Yes - this is a kid friendly site despite the name sounding as if it might not be!

It is great fun and would be a great way to encourage writing for children. You can make pictures and cards by choosing a background and dragging on characters which you can resize, rotate and add speech bubbles to.

You can also put backgrounds with scenes on them together in a sequence and make a storybook in this way. When making a movie, each character you add has a number of actions that you can programme them to do. You take one of the available actions and drag it up into the timeline. You can continue building up a sequence of these actions with a range of characters. You can also add special effects. This is great fun and takes perseverance as well. It could be considered a kids way to program (it reminds me of Alice but at a lower level). Like the storybook option, you can add more scenes to your movie to create a longer story.

To get the content off the site, you can print but you can only view the video online.

This is a great tool. You could use it to create the beginning of a story and print it and then children write the middle and ending. This is just one idea - I’m sure you could think of many other uses.

I have just spent most of the morning putting together a handout on the basics of how to use VoiceThread such as getting an account, uploading pictures, adding comments, creating extra identities and how to embed in a wiki or blog. This four page PDF handout is now available on my educationalsoftware wiki at http://educationalsoftware.wikispaces.com/Picture+Sharing

Here is an embedded example of a VoiceThread.

I have been having yet more fun with the image manipulation web 2.0 tool FotoFlexor.

I used their brand new Smart Scissors tool to cut out a picture of me on a hammock and layer a beach scene behind it. Quite a bit of fun!
I have also been looking for video case studies of ICT in action to use in our year group meeting days and have found a number of great sites from the UK.
Teacher TV
I have been using this site for a while now and always find great content to watch. Not just for ICT - I watched a great maths video that will change the way I teach fractions!
Teaching and Learning with ICT
A site with a HUGE number of video case studies and accompanying lesson plans and resources.
Developing Teaching Using ICT
Again, more video case studies as well as a bank of ideas that you can use.

Yes - I am continuing with my Xmas theme. I have been having fun turning myself into an elf and my husband into a drunk santa using the Greeting card option in FotoFlexor. Obviously this is not for kids given the wine bottle in Santa’s hands (and what hairy hands they are!) They have also added a number of new features since I last visited FotoFlexor such as photo morphing so it continues to be a brilliant online image editing tool.

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Xmasy Innes and Suzie, originally uploaded by suzievesper.

Ok, this is not the best picture I have ever worked on but I did do it in two seconds flat thanks to the online photo editor Picnik. They have a large range of Xmas shapes that can be added to you picture which are easily resized and rotated to fit with the image you are working on. They can take images from a variety of online sources such as Flickr or you can upload directly into Picnik. Thanks Innes for being a model with me! Why not have a go? (and I will still be talking about Zoho Creator very soon).

Well, I have been having a lot of fun with this tool. You can load pictures into Fotoflexor from your computer or from a number of online photo sites where you have photos stored such as Flickr. You can add a LARGE number of special effects to the images. This has to be one of the most comprehensive free image editors that I have seen. It can also work in layers with transparency and has clever tools for selecting part of images. In the picture above, I cut out a photo of my husband from another picture and added the trees as a background. I then blurred the trees slightly to give the picture a ‘depth of field’ effect. I then put in a picture of myself using my built-in webcam and was able to add that picture of myself to some ready made faces. In the above picture, I decided to be the face of Paris Hilton (I look a little purple because I took the photo of my face at night under tungsten lighting). I was able to scale my face to fit hers and move and rotate it until I was happy. I then removed the background of the photo and added it to my scene. This is just a small taste of the many tools that are on offer.One final feature that I really liked is the ability to send the picture back to online libraries such as Flickr or to download the pic to my computer. By saving it as a png, I was able to keep the transparency. It did take quite a long time to save so be patient. Very cool image editing!!

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What Can We Do With Flickr?, originally uploaded by cogdogblog.

Thanks to Ewan (involved in a full day workshop with him today) for showing this great resource. Click on the photo above to be taken to where it is on Flickr. The photo has a number of notes on the image that give you ideas on how to use Flickr and have a number of really useful links. This Flickr user has a number of great ideas in his photostream so have a play through some more of his photos. I have a lot more ideas on how I could use Flickr after today.

Yes - that is a bold statement but I am loving Vuvox!!

It is hard to believe that it is completely free! You can search your photos on Flickr, PhotoBucket or upload them from your computer. You can also do general web searches for images to use. You drag the photos you want to display into your storyboard area and then apply a style to use. Many aspects of each style can be customised to suit your purposes. You can save it to their server and then they give you the ability to embed the code on a wiki page. Way cool!! Click on each of the photos on my ‘emotion tree’ to get a close-up of them (I took these photos years ago - the quality of the photos isn’t all that great which is not Vuvox’s fault)