Monthly Archives: January 2009

Looking For Global Projects For Your Students?

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Image of world eyeLooking for activities to do with your students?

Here’s a couple of projects that I’m watching that might interest you.  Meanwhile if you know of any other projects that would interest educators – please leave a comment to share so we can all check them out.

Connecting Student Bloggers

Last year Miss Wyatt coordinated an International student blogging competition over 10 weeks from September to December.  It involved 500 students and classes from 9 countries of the world who participated by writing posts on class blogs, student blogs or as commenters.

By the end many expressed a desire to continue so the blog Bringing us together has been created to:

  • build on the friendships begun in 2008
  • encourage more students and classrooms from throughout the World to connect with each other

As a student or teacher, you can get involved with Bringing us together blog in various ways including:

  1. Writing your own posts and/or comments in response to their posts
  2. Using ideas from the blog for your own blogging and collaboration projects
  3. Volunteering for your class to be in charge of this blog for 2 weeks (contact Miss Wyatt)

Currently Ms Smith’s class is responsible for Bringing us together and her students have written some great posts.  Haley and Sophie has asked …what kind of pet makes you go YEOW!?, Sam and Michael G. have discussed things you look for in a friend while Brianne and Brittany made me very hungry with their cooking tips for after school snacks.

Students would love to hear your feedback! Can you tell us how is Bringing us together going by leaving a comment?  (Yes – if you leave a comment I will visit and leave comment on your blog 8) )

Skyping Around The World

Silvia Tolisano (Langwitches) is coordinating a project called Around the World with 80 schools.  She has written an excellent series of posts on this including tips for using Skype to connect classrooms:

  1. Reasons for Skyping in the Classroom
  2. Around The World with 80 Schools
  3. Update- Around The World With 80 Schools
  4. Map of Participants Around The World with 80 Schools
  5. Skype Connection Rituals
  6. We are Off! First Connection in Around the World with 80 Schools

You can also check out information on the Around the World with 80 schools wiki!

Strongly recommend that you consider joining this project or consider the concepts of these types of projects and how you might use them in your schools.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Would love to hear about other projects that would interest educators – please leave a comment to share.

Don’t forget if you’re interesting in skyping with other classrooms check out this page of The Edublogger and you can add your class to the list by leaving your contact details on this post.  I’m updating the list again soon!

Image by Lady Pain licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike.

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Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part II

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Hopefully our Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I post helped you set up and start using your Flickr account.  Now its time to learn how you can use Flickr as part of building your your personal learning network (PLN) in this second post of our Flickr series.

Connecting With Others

An important aspect of Flickr that may new users don’t appreciate is it’s a great tool for increasing your relationship with people in your personal learning network (PLN). Experienced Flickr users often check out their friends’ latest photos and leave comments when photos grabs their attention.

It’s really not that much different from blogging except you’re using the visual medium. Still connecting by sharing information and interacting with comments with added benefit of easy tracking of friends’ photos through adding people as contact.

There are several options for finding your friends’ Flickr accounts including:

  1. Bloggers often include a Flickr widget on their blog – clicking on the More Photo link opens up their Flickr account
  2. Search Flickr members

Image of adding contacts

Another great way of connecting with others is joining Flickr Groups. The 2009/365photo, where members share one photo per day for each day of the year, is an example of a group popular with educators.

Using RSS To Manage Your Flickr Account

The easiest way to check out your friends latest photos, monitor recent activities on your photos such as comments and track responses to comments you’ve left on other people’s photos is using RSS.

If you aren’t already using RSS to make your life easier make time to read this information and set up a Google Reader account! This way RSS brings latest updates from your Flickr account automatically into your Google Reader account.

You subscribe to your recent activities as shown in below. Remember to bring up the drop down arrow you hover your mouse over the icon (i.e. hover over You).

Image of subscribing to latest RSS activity

You follow the same process to subscribe to your contacts recent uploads except you click on the drop down arrow on Contacts and select Most Recent Uploads. NOTE: It only displays four uploads per day for each contact.

Organizing Your PhotosImage of collection vs sets

Using Sets and Collections is a great way of organizing your photos to make them easier for both you and your contacts to find.

Sets contain photos while Collections are used for grouping sets or collections together. For example, Pest, Predator, Disease Unit in my Flickr account is a collection which holds sets on aquaculture pest, predators and diseases such as this set of predator photos.

Free Flickr accounts have several restrictions including you can only create 3 sets, 100 MB monthly upload limit (10MB per photo) and views of your photos limited to the 200 most recent images. Paying US$24.95 a year to upgrade to a Pro Account is money well spent to get access to features like unlimited sets, storage and video uploads.

You organise your photos by clicking on the drop down arrow on Organize to create and add photos to sets, organise sets into collections, geotag photos, batch tag photos etc.

Image of organizing sets

FINAL THOUGHTS

Are you convinced of the benefits of Flickr yet?  My final post on this Flickr series is about cool stuff you can do with Flickr photos.

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Quick Start Tips For New Flickr Users: Part I

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Image of seagulls photoWith time you realize taking your own photos to use in your blog posts is often easier, and more fun, than searching for and attributing creative commons images. And sharing these photos online with your friends, using photosharing websites like Flickr, is even more fun!

This post is part of a series to help people started using Flickr or if you’re experienced using Flickr please share your tips for new people, by leaving a comment on this post.

About Flickr

Flickr is an extremely powerful image and video sharing website widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. Reasons for it’s popularity include:

  1. It’s amazing range of tools and options for organising, editing and sharing your photos
  2. It’s excellent features for connecting with others to create groups and communities
  3. The extensive range of third party applications that let you use public Flickr data like photos, video, tags in new and different ways
  4. The incredible number of creative commons images hosted on the site

Setting Up Your Flickr Account

Image of new accountTo get started you will need to go to Flickr and create an account using your Yahoo ID. Create a Yahoo ID here if you don’t have one.

Once you’ve signed into Flickr with your Yahoo ID it will ask you to choose your screen name i.e. username. I recommend you choose a screen name that makes it easier for others to relate to you as a real person. e.g. Compare spwat3 with suewaters — which is easier?

Image of buddy icon

After creating your account you will be taken to your home page. Make sure you take the time to Create your Buddy Icon, Choose Your Custom Flickr URL and Personalize Your Profile. These make it easier for people from your other social networks to connect with you on Flickr; they are important for building your personal learning network (PLN).

Here is my Flickr profile and bubby icon.

WARNING: Your custom Flickr URL can’t be changed once created so if unsure skip this step and complete later!

You can edit any of this information, except custom Flickr URL, at any time by hovering mouse over your buddy icon, clicking on drop down menu and selecting Your Account.

Tagging and Flickr

Image of tagged item

Before uploading any photos it’s important to understand tagging as they are very important for finding your photos.

Tagging is an method of categorizing where users choose their own keywords or terms to describe online content such as web sites, pictures and blog posts. The idea is that the user chooses tag terms that are meaningful to them to make it easier for them to find their stored information.

There are no guidelines to choosing tags and it’s common to see the same item tagged using different keywords by different users. To make items more findable in searches it’s worth using a range of terms commonly used to describe the image.

Image of taggingOn Flickr, to use more than one word together to describe an image you will need to enclose words with quotation marks. For example, to use the tag candy jar you need to write as “candy jar” or it will be tagged candy and jar.

Uploading Photos

Flickr has a wide range of options for uploading photos including:

  1. Upload page
  2. Uploader application that you can download and install on your desktop – applications available for PC, Mac and Linx – excellent when uploading lots of photos
  3. Email your photos from your phone- configure your email address for Flickr here
  4. Upload photos from your iphone using applications such as Flickup or PixUp

Emailing photos from your phone or uploading from an iphone is a fast and quick method of sharing photos when you’re out and about. Applications like Flickup means you can share your photo on Flickr as you are uploading.

Editing Photos

Once your photos have uploaded you can edit:

  1. Details like their title or description by clicking on eachImage of editing titles
  2. Photos by clicking on the photo which will take you to it’s photo page where you have options including Add notes (here is an example of a Flickr photo with notes), rotating image, adding more tags and Editing the photo directly on Flickr using Picnik.

Image of Picnik editing

FINAL THOUGHTS

Flickr is definitely a site that you need to take the time to explore thoroughly.

If you’re a Flickr user please leave a comment on this post to share:

  1. What you like about using Flickr
  2. Your tips for new people getting started using Flickr
  3. Links to your favorite Flickr photos — bonus points for chocolate photos :)

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