November 8, 2014

Wow. I thought this was going to be a piece of cake. Photo sharing would be the EASIEST of all of the assignments. I ended up spending hours on this one, and I’m still not happy with my progress!  I have to say I’m a photo-site junkie. I’ve been using Shutterfly for years. I’ve been saving my photos to Shutterfly since about 2003 and if that site ever goes down I’m toast. I’ve make dozens of photo books, helped other people make photo books, and set up photo sharing sites on Shutterfly. In fact, right now, my son’s high school football team is using Shutterfly for that very purpose. The mom who is the team photographer takes literally thousands of photos of each game and uploads them to the share site. Actually, anyone who has access to the share site can upload photos. Also, anyone with access to the share site can view all of the photos and do what they’d like with those photos, including downloading, saving, ordering prints, etc. Since I have a Shutterfly account, I just take any photos that have my son in them and save them into a file I’ve started in my account.  So, like I said, I really thought this assignment would be a breeze!

Now, with that said, I’ve never used Flickr. So I set up a Flickr account, and went into Mary Bennett’s Flickr site and added a comment which was very easy to do. I didn’t like that I had to set up a Yahoo mail account to set up a Flickr account though. I thought that was a little sneaky of Flickr to force me to use a Yahoo email account to sign up. I couldn’t find any way around that, and honestly I think I have enough email accounts as it is. I uploaded a bunch of photos from my computer, which also was easy to do, as well as add tags and captions to them.

As directed, after I created an account on Flickr, I went to Explore and explored the site. I can see that I could spend hours just exploring the various categories there. I liked the Commons category and can see how that can really be useful in education. First of all, these are photos for public use, without any copyright infringements. That’s always a great thing. Second, for research purposes, we may find some primary sources in there for students to use. The World Map is another great resource for education. When students are researching areas of the world, finding real photos of places they are researching would be amazing for them, and knowing that there is a connection there to real people who have taken these photos and posted them would make them meaningful. After spending quite a bit of time in the Explore category, I went into Groups. I started by searching for Librarians. There are 446! My favorite is Librarian Shoes. I guess it is librarians breaking the stereotypes – taking pictures of the shoes they wear to work. I was amazed at how many of the groups were dedicated to “breaking the stereotype.” After doing a few more searches, I noted that although there are many groups, it is nice to be able to see that Flickr tells you how many items are in the various groups. Many of the groups don’t have any items in them, which would be a waste of time to click on them.

The next thing I spent a very great amount of time on was attempting to put a NOTE on to one of my pictures. I really thought I was missing something by not finding the Action button and not being able to add a note. I read through all of the instructions repeatedly, and went into Flickr help, googled for information and read help forums. It turns out from all of my reading that I deduced that you are unable to do this anymore. So after all of that time, I just commented on one of my photos instead. That was a bit frustrating. However, it seems with most websites, they change frequently and when you least expect it … so expect it! J

The next frustrating thing, that again I spent a good chunk of time on, was attempting to upload a picture directly from Flickr to my blog. Unfortunately that was unsuccessful as well. I attempted this following the same steps as the note process, by following all the directions I was given, repeatedly, googling for directions, and reading help forums. All of the help I read was really no help at all. I went through as many different things as I could, trial and error, and nothing seemed to work. In the end I just ended up uploading the photo from my computer.

I have an Instagram account, which I do not use very much. However I know that the middle school media specialist in my district uses Instagram for her media center. She posts events in her media center, updates on what is going on in her school and has students following her. I just noticed that one of our elementary schools’ Art Departments has an Instagram account too. She had parents sign permission slips to have their students’ work posted. No names were posted with their work. I’ve asked permission to follow that Instagram account.

The project this immediately brings to mind is something that would assist teachers and students in preparing for the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment and Readiness for College and Careers – the test students in our school will take this spring that is technology based). One of the skills is responding to an image. Students will be given images and will have to write a written response. This is a visual literacy skill that a photo sharing site is perfect for. Using Flickr or Instagram, I would start simple. I would post a picture on a large screen, then using a site such as Padlet, I would have students write in 160 characters or less answers to the following questions:

·       What do you observe?

·       What does it remind you of?

·       What is the photographer’s (or artist’s if it is a painting) purpose?

·       Why does it matter?

Depending upon the grade level (this project could be done with any students in grades 3-6), I could start with 1-2 questions and work up. Using Padlet, I would only be requiring a small response. I would build on this project by using other methods of responses, and other types of questions. My 3^rd grade teachers are using Edmodo with their classes. They could also use this type of activity with their students on Edmodo.  For the upper grades, I liked another activity I read about – the 5 card Flickr activity where students are each given 5 random photos with the following questions:

·       Write down one word you associate with each image

·       Identify a song that comes to mind for one or more of the images

·       Describe what all of the images have in common

·       Compare your answers with classmates

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127512555@N06/

The Common Core Standard this project would address would be:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.4.8
Recall relevant information from experiences or gather relevant information from print and digital sources; take notes and categorize information, and provide a list of sources.

The NETS-S Standards these projects would address would be:

Creativity and Innovation

1B: Create original works as a means of personal or group expression

Communication and Collaboration

2A: Interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media

Research and Information Fluency

3B: Locate, organize, analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and ethically use information from a variety of sources and media

Critical Thinking, problem solving, and decision making

4D: Use multiple processes and diverse perspectives to explore alternative solutions

Digital Citizenship

5A: Advocate and practice safe, legal, and responsible use of information and technology

5B: Exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity