Flickr

“Flickr is an image and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community platform. In addition to being a popular website for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. As of June 2009^[update], it claims to host more than 3.6 billion images, up from 3 billion in November 2008” (Wikipedia, 2009, p.1).

Last week I opened an image depository account through Flickr, one of many social and imagery networks available on the internet. Flickr is like using an internal hard drive build into the internet that gives up to 100MB of free image and video storage space a month and can be accessed anywhere in the world from any computer. At home I use an external hard drive to store and backup all of my files from my laptops. This insures they are safe if my internal hard drive was to crash, but if anything happened to my external hard drive I could lose everything. There are more chances of my hardware crashing then the internet, but to be overly sure I will always keep a couple of backups of all my documents and images.

Flickr does not only store images but it also allows others to view them. Instead of emailing numerous images to my closest family and friends of my holidays, this site allows quick and easy access to view and share them, this stops clogging up emails and internet storage space. The photos uploaded onto this site will also need to be reduced down in size for quicker uploading and page viewing. Privacy settings can be set on private to only allow family and friends to view all my images or on public for all to see.

Flickr is a great pedagogy tool that can be used in a lot of the Essential Learnings. The learners can engage in the curriculum expectations while enjoying the process of learning and constructing meaning. In the scenario of the year five unit ‘Around the World in Ninety Days’ the students can create a flickr stream on their blogs to identify the places they have been. They can upload images through flickr search to their own accounts. Through flickr’s editing tools they can recreate and/or crop images to constitute a visually appealing ‘album’ with visual art “elements, concepts, processes and forms” (QSA: The Arts, 2009, p.3). Related to each image the learners will also illustrate a literary text to “entertain, evoke emotion, and convey messages and information” (QSA: English, 2009, p.4) about when the photo was taken. These are just a couple of ways that flickr can be used in the professional context on my future classroom.

All these pedagogy tools can be used to effectively support each of the essential learning areas, but with the introduction of continual usage of technology in the classroom comes explicitly teaching and awareness. Firstly it is my responsibility as a Learning Manager to ensure the safety of my learners and be aware of the risks associated with child exposure to the public. It is therefore vital that I first seek out these tools and the security protection that come with them before bringing it in the classroom. It will be my responsibility to follow the schools protocol and to ensure that parents give written consent to use their child’s photo for these activities. The safest and easiest accessible web site to go through will be The Learning Place.

Until my next learning experience,

Kind Regards

Lizzy

Reference List

QSA. (2009). The Essential Learnings: The Arts – by the end of Year 5 (Visual Art). Retrieved March 3, 2009, from: http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/learning/7262.html

QSA. (2009). The Essential Learnings: English – by the end of Year 5 (literary and non-literary texts). Retrieved March 3, 2009, from: http://www.qsa.qld.edu.au/learning/7284.html

Wikipedia. (2009). Flickr. Retrieved August 3, 2009, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr

Flickr. (2009) Share your photos. Watch the World. Accessed August 3, 2009, from: http://www.flickr.com/