Flickr and Lesson Plan

October 15, 2009

Flickr is a photo web service started in 2004 that has become very successful as an archival site used both personally and professionally. Flickr goes further than other such web services and offers extensive social bookmarking capabilities that ?tag? or cross-reference all uploads so that they can easily be accessed through tagging services such as del.icio.us.com. Flickr is a yahoo service and serves millions of people.

As a web 2.0 tool, this site definitely has educational uses. One of the best uses is for teaching language. Looking through the many possible sites when googling for lesson plans, yielded plans that dealt mostly with teaching language in some fashion: ESL, foreign or in the regular English classroom. Being a former literacy teacher, I could easily see the advantages of doing a Flickr search and finding pictures I could use for any number of lesson plans and certainly think it is applicable to any grade level, K-college. Flickr, once learned, is an easy, safe way to bring visual literacy into the classroom, and I could see it going way beyond just English. Having pictures would add spice and variety (remember brain based learning and the need for novelty?) to any content area.

I also see Flickr is an opportunity for the teacher to look at visual images and expand their own imaginations about what they could do with them. I saw Flickr as a perfect web tool to teach media literacy.
How simple to use for advertising and news and what?s real and what isn?t! It can offer a real compliment to YouTube and other viewer-friendly informational sites. The lesson plan that I chose to print out was from http://esl.about.com/od/converationlessonplans/a/l_flickr.htm, which outlined a lesson for ESL students but could also be used in a ?regular? English classroom. Looking at the lesson plan made me think not only of media literacy instruction, but expanding visual literacy in the classroom through learning body language for writing skills and also social skills lessons for counselors working with pullout groups. I could see its use outside of the classroom in the adult ed world, such as teaching seniors writing lessons on descriptive writing through using the same techniques if they wanted to write their memoirs for instance, as well as the benefits to seniors of learning web 2.0 tools. The use of the Flickr service offers opportunities both in and out of the traditional classroom.