Flickr

Chapter seven in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms touched on Flickr and its uses. I have heard about Flickr before but I was under the impression that it was a web tool for sharing pictures such as ShutterFly. I did not realize that Flickr was more than just the idea of sharing pictures with friends and relatives. Some positives that I learned about Flickr include the idea of being able to annotate pictures with audio as well as having the ability to post discussions about pictures. It reminds me some what of the albums on FaceBook (tagging, commenting.) The chapter made Flickr seem like it is also very user friendly. I am not sure that I like the fact that it deletes the account after 90 days of inactive use but I can understand why it is established that way.

The articles Photostreams to the People: The Commons on Flickr and Connecting the Dots: The Unexplored Promise of Visual Literacy in American Classrooms gave me more insight to what I already knew about Flickr as well as adding to what I had learned from the chapter. Again, it was reiterated that Flickr is much more than an online album. I also noticed that one of the pictures was captioned asking for help to determine the location of the picture that was taken in the 1920's. It reminded me of Wikipedia asking for help to verify the facts within the wiki. The second article really reached out to the visual learner, which I feel most times gets neglected in the older grades. Visual literacy also adds or corrects the way in which students view not only topics but the world. A student may visualize something, which is great use of the imagination but viewing a picture, video, etc. gives the student a correct image to build on.