Photo Sharing 101

Welcome to Photo Sharing 101. I am your most inadequate tour guide for this session. I was first introduced to Flickr last summer by a friend but gave no thought to its value. I was in for a surprise. Come on, let's take a look.

There are a variety of photo sharing sites on the web such as Snapfish http://www2.snapfish.ca/ and Photobucket http://photobucket.com/ but it is Flickr http://www.flickr.com/that we are going to discover. Flickr is a site to which users can upload images for others to see and comment on (Web 2.0 for Schools, Davies & Merchant, 2009, p.35)

As the authors Davies and Merchant state, this is a very basic definition, as Flickr does so much more. Flickr now allows users to upload video and is very much a social place such as Facebook or MySpace. The leap into Flickr was a big one for me. I have gone in and explored the site and searched other people's photos but I was very hesitant to create my own account. I am in a foreign world and although I think of myself as somewhat savy in the world of technology, I am quickly discovering I am not. And so I proscrastinate in doing these things I am most uncomfortable with.

To become familiar with Flickr I started by simply browsing the site. I checked out pictures of Thompson and the Miramichi which is my hometown. I also read the chapters on photosharing from Web 2.0 for Schools by Julia Davies and Guy Merchant as well as Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts by Will Richardson. Both of these helped to familiarize myself about the uses of Flickr. There was also a video that I found most useful. http://k12online.wm.edu/usingflickr/usingflickr.html This video is already four years old and some of the information may have already changed - one of the joys of the Internet but I think very helpful to a newbie like me just the same.

What does Flickr have to offer me personally?
I am very hesitant to post pictures of myself and my family for all the world to see. To start I have chosen photos where there are either no people or where the people in them are unidentifiable. I don't know how my friends and family would feel if they discovered photos of themselves on the Internet and without their permission?

In a year our family will be traveling for six months and will not have any particular place to call home. At that time, I see us maintaining a family blog and perhaps a site like Flickr where we will post our pictures. This will not only give us a safe place to keep them but also a way to document our travels. Family and friends can keep up to date on our progress and see where we have been. My hope is that my daughter's class will follow her through our blog and pictures and share a little of what her experiences will be. By sharing our photos and videos on Flickr we are given the opportunity to share with people our experiences before we even return home.

I really enjoy the ability to tag and give descriptions to my pictures. This is a powerful tool and is so much a part of my world as a teacher-librarian.


How can Flickr be used constructively in the classroom? As teachers and teacher-librarians, we are only limited by our own creativity and imagination. Having access to milllions of photographs provide an endless source of available pictures to our students. Last year I worked with a group grade two students who were making a digital scrapbook of pictures of objects around the school of specific shapes (square, circle, etc.) Instead of doing a power point project, these picture could have been uploaded to Flickr, placed in a specific group and a description written about them. When the teacher went to show them to the class, all she had to do was log in to her Flickr account and voila. Flickr is one of those sites that can be used from Kindergarten to grade 12. I am presently doing a research project with grade threes on African animals. Here is a wonderful place for us to find pictures and perhaps information on their specific animal. (If only we could access it!)

Flickr, or any other photo sharing site gives students the place to save, organize and display their digital photographs. Kathy Frederick in her article Launching Library 2.0 What's a Picture Worth? makes several suggestions on how to incorporate Flickr with students. She suggests making an online photo album of school events or post pictures to use as writing prompts. As well, it is a useful teaching tools for a teacher-librarian in teaching about issues "regarding intellectual property and the need to respect copyright."

The possibilities of Flickr are endless but the biggest obstacle in my school district and possibly yours is access. Without access to Flickr or any other such site, this discussion is a moot point. But I will save those thoughts for another discussion.