Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp in 2004 and later acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media . Yahoo has reported that Flickr has a total of 51 million registered member and 80 million unique visitors. In August 2011, it reported that it was hosting more than 6 billion images and this number continues to grow steadily according to reporting sources Photos and videos can be accessed from Flickr without the need of registering an account but an account must be made in order for the user to upload content onto the website. Registering an account also allows users to create a profile page containing photos and videos that the user has uploaded and also grants the ability to add another Flickr user as a contact. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app for iPhon , for Windows Phone 7, and for Android.
Using Flickr in Education
The presence of visual elements in today’s teaching and learning is increasing as the integration of images and visual presentations with text in textbooks, instructional manuals, classroom presentations, and computer interfaces broadens (Benson, 1997; Branton, 1999; Dwyer 1999)
The use of images in teaching and learning makes most students react positively. Everybody can get different things out of images. How can we embrace visual enhancements in instruction? Flickr is an online photo management and sharing application that allows educators to play with many different tools.
Let´s take a look at some of the visual possibilities we can include in our teaching scenarios.
FlickrStorm - a website where you can find creative common copyrighted photos and create a tray of photos you choose.
Flickr Toys - a website where you can create trading cards, movie posters, picture cubes and lots more with your photographs
Flickr Related Tag Viewer - a website that offers ideas of other tag words for the word that you type in.
Searching tools that use Flickr
Compfight Find and share Creative Commons images with this tools.
Flickr Storm Search on Flickr with some magic.
FlickRiver A great search option to view photos quickly and easily, in one seamless “river of photos” view. Browse images by group, by tag word, by user and by place.
World Cup teaching themes using Flickr images
Bubblr Is a very simple and easy website. Drag speech bubbles onto the photo and add text. Students have to describe their favourite football player.
Big Huge Labs This website allows you to create several things with your Flickr images and even the images uploaded from your own computer.
My students used the following options:
Imagine that the World cup has just finished. Create a magazine cover informing who won the world cup.
Turn words into pictures Write down the name and last name of a famous football player. This application will turn the words into letter pictures from Flickr cc library.
Other applications that use Flickr images
Picnik This online editing tools allow you to use your Flickr photos to edit them and add special effects. No registration required and you can save your edited picture into Flickr.
Splashr Search for Flickr images via tags, user ID, photo set ID or email address. The result obtained can be embedded to another site.
Retrievr Sketch a shape and then explore Flickr images that have similar shapes and colours.
Fastr Nice game to guess the tags of the different pictures shown.
No comments:
Post a Comment