Flickr-ing in the Classroom - Say CHEEEEESE!

Flickr (www.flickr.com/) is a free online tool that permits to upload, manage and organize, and share your pictures to the world. It is a tool that also has different levels of permission restrictions available so that it can be safely used for varied classroom enriching activities. Flickr's greatest strengths for the classroom, besides its picture organizing features, are (1) its ability to create discussions about the images to interact and learn from each other, and (2) its capability to tag the pictures so that students can connect their photos to other people's photos and contribute images on topics of interest to the community.

In his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, Richardson tells us of great ideas on incorporating Flickr into the classroom such as to capture daily events, daily highlights, field trips, speakers or visitors, and/or special projects to share them among the students, the parents, colleagues, or the community.

One of the features highlighted by Richardson, is the annotation tool which allows to add notes to parts of the image by dragging a box across an area of the image and typing text into a form. This feature can be utilized easily in class by having students upload images of, say, projects, experiments, or diagrams, and label (explain) each of the parts, materials needed, steps, or any item in the picture. Adding annotations to the image will allow these notes to pop up as the mouse rolls over the picture and can easily help identify what students are looking at. This feature can also be a great tool to use by the teacher when explaining how an experiment should be conducted, or what are the expected results for any given project.

One great use that I've found with Flickr, is to teach the students about copyright and proper appropriation of other people's work through the use of Creative Commons copyright licenses. For more on Creative Commons licenses read my blog on How To Get Images From the Internet and Not Get In Trouble.

Another feature that Flickr offers, is its capability to create RSS feeds for the comments on the pictures, that way if the teacher or classroom share a picture for discussion, instead of having to load every time the picture's page to see the comments posted by the students, all the teacher has to do is subscribe to the RSS feed and all the comments will be fed to the teacher as they are posted through RSS tools such as Google Reader. Also, if the class is interested in some topic, the students can easily 'subscribe' to a particular tag (topic) and receive photos as other people upload them by adding the full URL with the particular tag into Google Reader. For example, if the class was interested in getting pictures of the state they were studying, say 'Texas', all they would have to do is add the URL www.flickr.com/photos/tags/texas to their Google Reader subscriptions. This could come in very handy if your students are already experimenting with blogs and reading each other's blog with Google Reader.

If you are interested in Google Reader you can see more of it in the following video:

Another interesting use for Flickr in the classroom, is through its ability to integrate with Google Maps that allows to give a global sense and teach geography via the uploaded photos so that the photos the students upload into Flickr.com can open up to the place where they were taken on Google Earth or Google Maps. All one has to do for this is to open Google Maps (https://maps.google.com/) enter the address where the photo was taken, and in the URL, you will find the latitude and longitude information (after "11=) that you will need to copy.

You will than have to add to Flickr the latitude, longitude, and 'geotagged' tags into your picture.

Once you upload your photo, the page where your photo recides will display a map with the location where the photo was taken.

And, if you click inside the map, a popup window will display a zoomed in version of the map with the exact location.

Imagine now if the students were to create a photo tour of their community or city! 

Marco Cesar Saenz
Using Web Tools in the Classroom




References

Richardson, W. (2010). Chapter 7: Fun with Flickr: Creating, Publishing, and using images online, from the book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (3rd ed.), Corwin Press. pp. 101-110.

How To Get Images From the Internet and Not Get In Trouble?

This week I discovered a way to borrow and use images from the Internet and not get in trouble for it. Normally, for my students, it is hard to take your own pictures for every project that they make, and we end up searching the Internet and using pictures that we do not have a right or permission to use. Gladly, because it is for education purposes, we are protected under the fair use doctrine (a set of factors and considerations, or exceptions to the copyright law, that help us figure out which things we can do without permission).

But this week, in one of my assignments for a class at the university, we were introduced to Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org), an organization which has made available six licenses that allow the authors to specify the rights they wave or reserve for their digital products. These rights are:



Attribution: Which requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product.




Attribution-NoDebris: Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but they cannot change or derive other work from the original image or product.




Attribution-Noncommercial:  Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but can only be used for noncommercial purposes.



Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike:  Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but the work can only be used for noncommercial purposes and resulting works have to have the same license as the original work.



Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDevris:  Requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product but can only be used for noncommercial purposes and they can use it as long as they do not change or derive other work from the original image or product.



Attribution-ShareAlike: Which requires others to give the author credit as the author when using their digital product and the resulting works have to have the same license as the original work.

For more information on Creative Commons see this video:

So now you may be asking yourselves, how do we find images on the Internet that have a Creative Commons license?

There is a really easy way, that probably most of us have used but that we haven't (at least I hadn't) noticed the Creative Commons licensing information. That easy way is using Flickr (http://www.flickr.com). Next time you search for images, once you select an image to go to its 'page', look on the bottom right hand side of the information displayed, and under 'Owner settings' you will see if the photo has creative commons license and what are you able to do with that digital work.

  

To show you an example, I created a SlideShow in Flickr, using images with Creative Commons licenses. If you go to the image details, under the description of the pictures you can read what type of Creative Commons license each had and the original source and author of each image. You can see the images here or see the slide show below.

Marco Cesar Saenz
Using Web Tools in the Classroom

Sketching with electronics

I couldn't resist sharing this video, Leah Buechley and her team in MIT, have designed a way to link bateries to light nodes and to computers through lines drawn with a conductive pen. So now electronics can really be designed using just pen and paper.
TED: Leah Buechley: How to “sketch” with electronics - Leah Buechley (2011)



Marco Cesar Saenz
Using Web Tools in the Classroom

Technology Integrated Lesson for Grandparents' Day

This blog describes the initial ideas of a technology-integration lesson. In it, during the next couple of days, I’ll explain why I want to focus on this lesson, and what technological tools the students and teacher will use. I will make changes to it as I go along, so keep coming back.

These are my initial ideas of a technology integrated lesson that will use Web 2.0 tools. I teach computer science, English, history, and science to 7^th and 8^th graders. I usually like to take advantage that I have them with me at the computer lab three times a week to integrate technology into their regular classroom lesson plans. Thus, for that reason, my students’ weekly assignments for history, English, and science are creating/posting blogs, creating/updating websites, searching for information, and/or working together in collaborative applications such as Google docs.

As in most schools, we celebrate Grandparents’ Day, it will be held next week, and I couldn’t resist the opportunity to also integrate technology to the celebration. I have planned two activities that the students will perform with their grandparents: The first activity will be a simple one and will not really involve technology, here, students and grandparents will take each a quiz where they will be presented with a 12-item matching exercise. The students’ quiz will test them on their knowledge of old-fashioned slang words, and the quiz that the grandparents will take will test them on modern, teen slang words. On the second activity, students and grandparents will work together to fill out a family tree that will try to gather the information of six generations, all the way back to the great-great-grandparents. In my experience, most people, and in this case my students, can only recall back the names up to their grandparents, so I wanted to take the opportunity that their grandparents were here because they will most probably know and recall the names of their parents and grandparents.

Once we have all the information, back to the great-great-grandparents, the students will collaboratively work to fill out a Google spreadsheet with their relatives’ information including the student’s name, relative’s relationship (i.e. father, mother, grandmother, grandfather, and great-grandparent), the name, and the last name of the relative. After we have gathered all this data, the students will search on the Internet for the origin, and meaning of their last names, and they will add two extra columns to the Google spreadsheet with this information.

When all data is entered, we will publish that information using Exhibit 3.0, an open-source software that lets you easily create websites where data can be displayed in grids, sorted, searched for, and displayed in interactive maps. For examples of this software go to http://www.simile-widgets.org/exhibit/


Marco Cesar Saenz
Using Web Tools in the Classroom

What is Social Bookmarking and Why is It Important for Education

What is Social Bookmarking?

                                                         Image 1

Social bookmarking enables users to bookmark their favorite sites, just like when you add a web site's URL, or address, into your 'favorites' on any Internet browser, but with (1) the added possibility to access these bookmarks from any computer with an Internet connection, so that the bookmarked sites are not anymore limited to just one computer, (2) the ability to organize your bookmarks into your own created categories, tags, and a variety of ways able to see these bookmarked sites by topic or theme, and (3) the capability of sharing your bookmarks with other users, and learn also from the shared bookmarks of others. One sample of these social bookmarking sites is http://www.Delicious.com, to use it; all you have to do is sign up for a free account and start bookmarking. For a quick tutorial on the use of and an explanation of Delicious.com you can go to http://www.commoncraft.com/video/social-bookmarking.

Why is It Important for Education?

Schools and teachers must look for ways to incorporate into the curriculum the cool new and free technologies that Web has to offer nowadays. These technologies and applications, or what are now called Web 2.0 tools, such as the ones we have discussed in previous posts, and the social bookmarking tool that is explained here, can become great aids for the teachers and the students in the learning process. 

Social bookmarking for example could be used in a research process, giving the students the ability to share the websites they find useful. Delicious, and other social bookmarking tools, provides the possibility to create RSS feeds that list the bookmarked links, teachers can take advantage of these and subscribe to these to follow the direction each group is taking in any search or project. The teachers can also use social bookmarking to provide lists of useful URLs for the students to read prior to starting or during a certain topic, and because of its organization capabilities, resources can easily be organized by class, unit, project, or topic.

Marco Cesar Saenz

Using Web Tools in the Classroom

Image 1 retrieved from http://www.linkbuildingservice.com/social-bookmarking-service.html on November 10, 2012. 

Incorporating Technology (Such as Social Networking) Into the Classroom

The majority of schools prohibit the use of personal computer devices in school; and the students are also prohibited to use school computers to access any type of social networking site because they are regarded as a waste of time and a risk to the safety of the students, particularly talking about those in elementary. But as the years go by, we are more and more immersed in and with technology, so much that there will be a time where schools can no longer turn their heads from, nor shut their eyes to technology and will have to embrace it and look for ways to efficiently incorporate it into their curriculum, daily activities, and lesson plans.

I understand why schools are afraid to let technology be fully integrated. After all, it would just raise one more flag to watch out to make sure students are safe, that they aren’t taking risky actions nor engaging in dangerous or improper conversations. But, the way I see technology is surrounding us, schools should turn the tables, teach students how to be safe and take precautions, and allow them to make use of the tools and benefit from those in a safe and educational rich environment.

Taking twitter for example, a very simple to use but robust social network tool, teachers could easily take advantage of the easiness and accessibility that it provides for posting and have the classroom post summaries or list major key points of an article or chapter that they may be assigned to read. All thought each post is limited to 140 characters, many of the available tools, such as Tweet Caster (http://tweetcaster.com/), that allow you to post longer by adding a URL link (hyperlink) to your post that redirects to the full post when clicked.

One other way twitter can be utilized in the classroom, is by having students post (suggest) a hyperlink to a useful web resource, an interesting blog, video, or website that may further explain or exemplify a concept, or a related article, of the topic under study. Also students could tweet their reactions and/or comments to any book that they are reading.
It is only a matter of years before we are one-hundred times more dependent and involved with technology that we can even imagine. Today is the time that school can start taking action and incorporating technology devices and tools into their daily activities so that they do not become overwhelmed in the near future with so much technology that they won’t even know where to start, what, or how to use it.

Marco Cesar Saenz
Using Web Tools in the Classroom

Empowering Students One Podcast At a Time

                                       Image 1

We have previously discussed about the effectiveness and usefulness of utilizing text publishing tools, such as wikis, collaborative software, and web apps that allow students to create digital stories. Text is not the only thing students can freely publish, they can also enhance their blogs and/or other publications or documents with audio and video. With the availability and easiness of use of free pod-casting tools, there was no reason why pod-casts (in the form of either video or audio) would not become part of the classroom settings and empower students with more tools to express themselves and their ideas. And as it turns out, according to Will Richardson, in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, because of the easiness of the use of these tools, the possibilities of what to publish are endless and the projects can be as complex or as simple as one designs them to be.






                                                                                                         Image 2


To give two examples of how pod-casts can be incorporated into the classroom: First, the yearbook class could prepare a series of video pod-casts on a documentary on the reflections and thoughts of the graduating 8th grade students, which not only can be uploaded to YouTube, a storage server (the school's or a free server such as archive.org, TeacherTube.com, or Gcast), or the classroom blog, but which could also be linked from the yearbook with a QR bar-code, which have grown so popular nowadays. Secondly, Students in 5th through 8th grade could record audio pod-casts on reflections, inferences, and synthesis of the different sections of their textbook units, such as history and/or science. These pod-casts could be created and posted easily on the Internet and if posted on a Blog, they could be used as a start up point for a discussion, students could ask any questions they have on a particular section and the rest of the students would be able to help them, answer their questions, explain the material in their words, and as a result, students will be teaching students. Also questions on the material covered could be prompted by the teacher and or other students in the form of comments to the original posts and students could be asked to discuss the answer to these and to formulate a final, complete answer for each.



Marco Cesar Saenz
Using Web Tools in the Classroom




Image 1, retrieved from:
http://mag.sky.it/mag/web_style/2009/02/22/podcast_tutti_i_migliori_della_rete.html, on October 25, 2012.

Image 2, retrieved from:
http://www.sddu.leeds.ac.uk/online_resources/podcasting/creating.html on October 25, 2012.