Week 7

Chapter seven, Fun with Flickr is about a website where you can upload digital photos or videos that you take from a fieldtrip or throughout the day in the classroom. You can then share them on the web with parents and other community members. Flickr is free as long as you do not publish more than two 500MB videos a month and more than 100MB photos a month. Otherwise you have to create an account, which is $24.95 a year. By having an account it gives you unlimited photo and video uploads, unlimited storage ability, and unlimited viewing ability. Another great thing about Flickr is the privacy settings. When posting a picture you can make the comments that are posted under the picture private so only people you want to see them can see them. I also liked the idea that each photo that gets uploaded to Flickr can have “tags” or keywords associated with it by the publisher, and those tags are then searchable around the world. It is another great way for people to connect with others from around the world.

In the article, Photostreams to the People consisted of information about Flickr. According to Peggy Garvin, “Flickr began to develop The Commons when the Library of Congress proposed using the popular site to expose more people to its photo collections and to experiment with Web 2.0 interactivity.” I found this fact to be very knowledgeable in how Flickr was developed. I found the section on Social Media and Public Institutions to be very interesting and controversial. According to Peggy Garvin, “the 2009 CIL panelists each judged their participation as a success, citing the positive feedback from the public and the press and the rewards of richer contacts with their users.” I think this is a great positive reinforcement for teachers to know when deciding if they want to use Flickr in their classroom.

In the article, The Unexplored Promise of Visual Literacy in American Classrooms I enjoyed reading. According to Larry Myatt, “now, more than ever, we need to connect the dots and make way for the powerful visual thinking lying dormant within our classrooms to surface in order to make sure our young people have the chance they deserve to pass the hurdles we put in their way.” This is so true because according to Larry Myatt, “the classrooms are likely to have anywhere from 4 to 10 students with special needs, ranging from those who require minor accommodations to others who need teachers to make substantial adjustments to their planning, instructional materials, and assessments.” By implementing new technology in the classroom I feel it will help students learn better academically through technology based interventions, especially the students with a learning disability.