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.

Social Bookmarking

Before I read the segment on tagging, I was a bit confused about what social bookmarking could possibly be. Tagging, however, made it entirely clear given the rise of the hashtag. The term folksonomy was especially helpful for me in conceiving of the way users construct categories of information.

A social bookmarking website could be very useful for gathering a collection of student-safe web resources. Teachers could create a repository of websites that have been reviewed in advance for safety and reliability. Students could search through these collected pages in order to perform research at various levels without much concern they will view inappropriate material.

With the use I described, students would have to fulfill standard 2.a of ISTE-S by interacting with peers and experts and employing a variety of digital media to do so. Again with this activity, I feel like CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8 is directly applicable.

RSS on the WWW

Years ago I tried using an RSS feed aggregator inside of Mozilla's Thunderbird. It was great at first. All of the blog posts and new articles on my favorite football teams or from my favorite news sources came right to my email application. I could scan through them quickly to stay abreast of the latest.

Eventually, however, I added too many feeds. Missing a day of checking them off as Read meant that the number of new posts grew to unrealistic amounts. It felt overwhelming, and I started ignoring that part of Thunderbird by marking all new entries as Read. The whole thing became a bit of a waste.

Later, I found out about Mozilla's live bookmarks, and that was exactly what I needed! The browser could hold ten or so of my favorite feeds, and no longer did I feel like I had 50 email inboxes that were filling up. Instead, the feeds were just button I could hold the mouse over to check if anything new had been published. This is the way I still use RSS feeds.

In the classroom, an RSS feed aggregator could greatly aid courses in finding the latest on a topic under study. For example, in an ELA class studying Shakespeare, the class could set up an account for news and publication feeds about Shakespeare and his plays. It could be a weekly part of the curriculum to check the class feeds and summarize news on Shakespeare research or performances.

An class assignment of this type would satisfy numerous Common Core objectives. In particular, this standard really jumps out in my mind:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.8
Gather relevant information from multiple authoritative print and digital sources, using advanced searches effectively; assess the usefulness of each source in answering the research question; integrate information into the text selectively to maintain the flow of ideas, avoiding plagiarism and following a standard format for citation.

The portions about "using advanced searches effectively" and "assess the usefulness of each source" strike me as particularly relevant.

This activity would apply to ISTE-S (ISTE - Student PDF) in that students would have to "select and use applications effectively and productively" (6.b) and "evaluate and select information sources based on the appropriateness to specific tasks" (3.c).

Back to Blogging

It has been more than three years since I last blogged. In that time many things about my life have changed. However, using a blog for self-expression and easy publication remains a great tool.

I intend to return to posting my occasional ruminations here at Ordered Musings. This is a convenient place to work out my thoughts and keep notes that I might not otherwise record. Just looking back at this blog showed me how many moments of inquiry can become launching points for creative expression. In all honesty, I don't even remember writing those posts. I remember being surprised by the word butter in the LXX, but I have no recollection of Homeric apostrophes. It's a sad admission.

What this demonstrates, however, is how useful a blog can be for chronicling all sorts of journeys in life.