Flickr for Teachers: Your Own Personal Web Page

Click on the about link in flickr and here's what you'll find:

"Flickr - almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world - has two main goals:

1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos."

If classroom teachers could take those goals and put them into their own words they might read:

1. I want to make my classroom photos available to members of the school community including parents, administrators, and other stakeholders.
2. I want to have a place to store my photos, regardless of platform, and use those photos in engaging classroom projects.
   

Building on the first goal, a great way to use flickr in the classroom would be as a homepage that documents the events of a particular classroom throughout a school year through digital images. Once a teacher creates an account on the site, the URL can be made available to parents and other members of the school community so they can watch the school year unfold in photos.

Here is how it might work:

• Our Class - Mrs. Jones is a third grade teacher who is great at keeping contact with parents. At the beginning of the year she takes photos of each student in her classroom and uploads the photos to the classroom flickr account. In addition, she takes the biographical information she collects on each student and adds a description of each student under their photo. Mrs. Jones then creates a set titled Our Class or Who Are We? using the photos and descriptions. Now parents can come to the site and page through the set to learn a little something about the students in their child's classroom. They can also add an inspiring comment for their child.
• Field Trip - Last Thursday Mrs. Jones' class took a field trip to the local natural history museum. With flickr in mind, Mrs. Jones snaps several photos of students at various exhibits with a digital camera. By Monday, she has uploaded the photos and created a set titled Field Trip to the Natural History Museum.
  

The possibilities are endless--photos from class parties, a science fair, class projects, assemblies, and on and on. Using flickr is more effecient than creating a web page and then taking the time to update it when new photos are added. Using flickr, you simply upload the photos, add a description, and the page updates itself.

So this ends chapter one of section one. Next up, enhancing learning through the blogging of photos from flickr.