Activity 3 - Photos and Images

1. Explore Flickr

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr to catapult the idea of “sharing” into a full blown online community. Within the past year, Flickr has become the fastest growing photo sharing site on the web and is known as one of the first websites to use keyword “tags” to create associations and connections between photos and users of the site.

For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a good look at Flickr and discover what this site has to offer. Find out how tags work, what groups are, and all the neat things that people and other primary schools are using Flickr for.

Discovery Resources:

• Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)
• Getting Started with Flickr, Part 1 and Part 2 - by teacher John Pearce
• Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
• Flickr: Popular tags

              Interesting- Last 7 days

• Flickr Services (3rd party applications & mashups)

  and let’s not forget to look at some other primary schools on Flickr

Discovery Exercise:

Take a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image that you want to blog about. Be sure to include either a link to the image or, if you create a Flickr account, you can use Flickr's blogging tool to add the image in your post. Another option you have for including images in your post is to use Blogger's photo upload tool.

PS: A quick word about photo posting etiquette - All of us as staff know the need to have permission of those pictured in a photo (or their parents if they are children) before posting up for display on the Internet.  Never upload pictures that weren't taken by you (unless you have the photographer's consent) and always give credit when you include photos taken by someone else in your blog.

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Like many web 2.0 sites, Flickr has encouraged other people to build their own online applications using images found on the site. Through the use of APIs (application programming interfaces), many people have created third party tools and mashups* that use Flickr images. Here are just a sampling of a few …

• Mappr - allows you to take Flickr images and paste them on a map
• Flickr Color Pickr - lets you find public photos in Flickr that match a specific color
• Montagr – create a photo mosaic from photos found on Flickr
• Trading Card Maker - a little bit of fun.

Discover more mashups, web apps, and Flickr tools.

Discovery Exercise:

1. Explore some of the fun Flickr mashups and 3rd party tools that are out there.

2. Create a blog post about one that intrigues you.

So have some fun discovering and exploring some neat little applications.  And if you're up to the challenge while you’re at it, why not create a trading card of your own.

* Mashup Note: Wikipedia offers some great articles that explain mashups. Basically they are hybrid web applications that take features from one application (like Flickr) and mash it up with another (like a map). In this example, you get Mappr (http://mappr.com).

The image headings on this page were created with the mashup Spell with Flickr