Week 3, Thing #6: Flickr Mashups

My head is still reeling from exploring Flickr's mashups, web apps, and tools! Although it was exciting to see the creative ways how Flickr images are used, it was also a bit overwhelming. Browsing through a few of the games was cute and distracting, but I wanted to discover a Flickr tool that had classroom applications.

The Flickr mashups that I thought would be useful were Trippermap or Flickrmap and Travelr, which seem to do the same thing. They both take your pictures from Flickr and map them. I like the idea of viewing photos of a place while simultaneously orienting them on a world map. Studying a map with photo albums of the cities and its people gives students the opportunity to discover more meaning from political and topographical maps. These tools give you the freedom to create your own maps from your own pictures. This means, however, that your maps are restricted to the pictures that you own. I was wondering if there was a Flickr tool where images around the world are shared. I have a hunch that Mappr does this, but only for the U.S. I can only hunch because when I went on their website it only describes what Mappr does, and there is no demonstration. Did I just miss the link for it?

In terms of classroom applications for Flickr, I saw the suggestions for trading cards and magazine covers. I imagine that the trading card idea would work great for history classes as a way to study biographies and English classes when studying the characters from novels.

In my earlier post I was playing around with Flickr by finding pictures that related to words I typed in the search engine. One classroom application this may have is for vocabulary assignments or even studying SAT vocab. Students could use their vocabulary list and find pictures that define the word, and write a corresponding sentence that utilizes the word and relates to the picture. Visual learners would benefit from this visual vocabulary list, especially one that they created for themselves.

Week 3, Thing #5: Flickr-ing

I have been exploring Flickr, the image-sharing website and it's been quite fun. Reading the tags, and observing how people tag their photos has been amusing. According to their most popular tags, the website has many photos of family, parties, and weddings. The last time I checked, Japan was on the of the biggest countries tagged too. You can be creative when tagging your photos, and it seems that Flickr covers a range of adjectives, nouns, and verbs. I even searched with the keyword "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and I got 35 results!!!!

The photo that caught my attention was a picture of a group of men browsing through children's books in a bookstore in the Philippines. I found the picture via Flickr's search tool, when I typed in the keywords "library" and "Philippines." I chose these two keywords because they are two of my favorite places in the world. I thought this picture was surprising and it made me wonder why these young men (in uniform) were avidly looking through these children's books. Are they looking for a books to read to their kids? Were they just attracted to the cute illustrations? Or perhaps they are seeking books with which they can practice their English? I wonder.