Module One: Research Activity One: Part Three Image Blogs

I'll be honest. I have never used Flickr or any other image blog before. I always considered these an extension of social networking. After Facebook, which became popular when I was college, Twitter became   the next new thing. I always looked at Twitter as a Facebook with only status updates. Consequently, I looked at Flickr the same way, a Facebook of only pictures.

After looking over some image blogs, particularly the Jane Goodall Camp model : http://www.flickr.com/photos/lewiselementary/69461520/ I realized that an image blog can be a great way to display student work. Not only is this a useful archive for teachers and students, but for parents as well. But it occurs to me how random and unorganized the content on an image blog is. Unit I looked at The Secret Life of Plants http://www.flickr.com/groups/secretlife/pool/show/. This blog displayed content that was all related in a similar category. It told a story, so to speak.Then, I researched further I realized that you could tag and caption content to make it searchable and organized.

Okay, so I'm impressed. But this still begs the question: What would I do with this in a classroom? Well, I mentioned earlier that both Twitter and Flickr are like a single element of a larger social networking narrative.  I still believe this, though I no longer devalue these sites because of it. Instead I ask, what if students fill in that narrative with its missing content. Maybe not in the same way that Facebook would, but we have a picture with little to no textual content. So I'm thinking a year wide writing project. Can anyone say bell-ringers? Picture this (no pun intended): Each day a teacher puts a picture from Flickr up on the projection screen. The picture could be anything, but it is dated and captioned with a short writing assignment. For instance, say you are reading The Great Gatsby, you have talked about the 20's and the Jazz age, the economic climate and how it impacted writing of the time. So for today's bell-ringer you may post a notable painting or photograph from the same era with a caption that says: "We have talked about the influence that the 20's culture has had on Fitzgerald's writing. Consider the above picture which was produced in the same era. Discuss how the painting might have been influenced by the culture of the 20's, can you draw a comparison between the painting and The Great Gatsby as representations of 20's culture?" What's great about this is that all bell-ringers would be online and dated so that absent students would be able to keep up with the work from home.