Photo-sharing and Flickr

Photo-sharing was quite cumbersome in the early days of the Internet. I recall using email at first and then moving on to posting pictures on my own Web space. That also required sending an email to the people I wanted to see my pictures. When I first heard of Flickr, my friends who were into photography introduced me so they could show me their pictures. One of the most impressive features to me at the time was the way Flickr automatically scaled the images so a visitor could download a picture at different sizes and resolutions. Of course, titling and tagging are what make searching images possible on Flickr. It seems that Facebook and Instagram have become the most popular photo-sharing services at this point. Over the years I have also used DeviantArt (http://www.deviantart.com/) as a source for images. It can be edgy at times, but some of the digital art is amazing.

Here is a picture I took in while on a mission trip in Hungary.

Heroes' Square in Budapest

Flickr would make a good classroom resource for constructing storyboards as part of a pre-writing exercise. After assigning a topic, I could ask students to find four or five pictures on Flickr that contain a unifying element representative of an author, for example Poe. They would then use those images as a storyboard for composing a short story in the style of Poe.




I repeatedly use photos as part of my curriculum in vocabulary, grammar, and literary history. With grammar in particular, I use images to engage students in thinking about how they use language to describe the contents of a picture. This is a great point of departure for getting students to take a critical look at their own use of language.

An exercise like the Poe storyboard seems to apply most to the first standard of ISTE-S, Creativity and Innovation. Students would be creating something original as a means of self expression. Their storyboards would serve as the background for original writing.