Book Review

Flickr: A Great Tool for Educators


“Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom” is a great book to introduce those working in classrooms to technologies that they never thought be useful in a school setting. Teachers can have students use blogs to post responses as well as journal entries to topics and curriculum used in the classroom versus having students use the traditional pen and paper. Students can also respond to each other and leave comments which is a good way to make students feel that there is a sense of community from one student to another. There are so many other tools discussed in this book ranging from using wikis, RSS feeds, podcasts, etc. that would be great assets in every classroom.

Flickr is just one of the wonderful technologies that is mentioned. It is a photo-hosting program which one can download for free on the web. Although many use Flickr simply to have a place to publish photographs to share with friends and family, there is much more that you can use this program for.

With Flickr, people all over the world have published their photographs allowing users to leave comments. Students can comment on pictures writing their own descriptions about them, as well as their own observations.

One learning opportunity a teacher could have for students would be to have students use the annotation feature where students can add details and notes to a picture. For instance one student mentioned used Flickr to identify all the different features of a model she had created based on Jane Goodall’s camp. This is a wonderful feature because it allows students to see all the different up close details from topics and subjects that they are studying.
Flickr has a feature known as “tagging” where pictures are labeled under certain keywords such as “Paris, “dogs”, and “roses.” By having this feature, teachers and students can
easily locate photographs related to what is being learned in the classroom. For instance if the class is learning about the White House, they could search for photographs containing that tag. Pictures showing up might be digital images of different rooms in the White House, what it looked like long ago, paintings, etc.

One of my favorite suggestions on how to use Flickr in the classroom is to type any word that comes to mind into the tag field. Students can select a picture that appears, and then can write a short story based on the picture. This is a great free write for students because they don’t have to write something necessarily related to the curriculum. I believe this is a great alternative instead of having students write for five minutes to a posted question on the board each morning.

I believe Flickr has great potential and can always be used in the classroom. Although my favorite techniques that were mentioned related mainly to the humanities and sciences, you can also use Flickr for mathematics which one teacher did. With new teachers having to take technology courses, I feel that they will learn about what they can use Flickr for in their classrooms to address the curriculum. Until I read this chapter, I had searched for photographs on Flickr, but never found a relationship between photographs on there and the classroom. Now I am aware of many strategies that one can use to help students learn as well to play a larger part in the classroom community. Hopefully teachers will be open minded and not afraid to use Flickr because it is quite an underrated technology for the classroom.

Reference
Richardson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms.
Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Press.