Flick for Teachers: Blogging Photos Part 2

In my last Flickr for Teachers post I outlined some ways that teachers can enhance student learning using the blogging feature of Flickr. The focus was on using photos as writing prompts in group, or class blogs. This post will focus on using photos from a class Flickr account in individual student blogs. The information presented below will be based on an article by Diane McGrath in the April 2005 Connected Newsletter titled 7 Tips for Successful Project-Based Learning. I've chosen a few of the tips from the article that I think Flickrblogs (a new term?) support. Here they are:

• Tip one: Blog as an Artifact
  
• "Students construct an artifact to help make their thinking visible, discussable, and revisable. It may be a physical object, multimedia, or a concept map." In our case, the artifact would be a photo, or a series of photos, that students have taken that display their learning during a project and blogged from Flickr.
  
• When they post the photo as part of a blog entry, students can also provide a description and a series of links to related material on the web.
• The blog makes the artifact visible to the whole school community.
• The comment link assures that the artifact is discussable.
  
• Tip Four: Blogs as communities of learners
• "Design your classroom to be a community of learners." The Flickr site maintains that its goal is to "...help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them." In other words, the goal is to create a community of people interested in sharing their photos. Blogs also support communities; in fact, one could argue that the purpose of blogs is to support the development of communities.
  
• Tip Five: Blogs are technology tools.
  
• "Learners can use real adult tools to...design artifacts." Based on the article, Flickrblogs would be great tools for expression, communication, and particularly cognition (tools that make thinking visible and fixable).
• Tip Seven: Blogs provide real audiences.
• "Students conclude their project with a presentation to a real audience."

I'm feeling some serious inspiration after writing this post. I'm seeing a project on probability that students complete on a Flickrblog coming up here in the next few weeks. Next up, sets in Flickr as artifacts of project-based learning.

Categories: education | Flickr | blogs | classroom | math