With Flickr, you can upload a picture for friends and family to see or let the world see. This reminded me of my experience with photo sharing in Face Book. I love when my friends and family leave comments on the photos I've shared. Flickr works in this way too. Where Flickr differs is in the application. Flickr allows you to put in a tag and see all the pictures related to that tag. You can arrange your pictures and make a slideshow on site or take a single picture and annotate certain parts of it to provide more details. You can also map out the exact location of where a photo was taken, which is a great way to connect photos to geography. You can also use your pictures to create and edit magazine covers or movie posters. How cool is that?! These ideas and more are known as FlickrToys.
In my first grade class, we are about to study George Washington Carver. We're also about to study plant parts and needs. I thought I would tie these two themes together. I found several pictures of peanuts, peanut plants, harvesting, etc. in the photos available for use in the Creative Commons section. Seeing how a peanut grows and is harvested seemed like a good place to start before telling about all the great things George Washington Carver used peanuts for. Unfortunately, like so many these days, we have a couple of kids with peanut allergies. We have to be extra careful when bringing things into the classroom. Flickr gives us the opportunity to bring peanuts into the classroom in a safe way. And, if you can't actually have peanuts in your room, you could try these... unless, that is, they are produced in a factory that also contains peanuts.
Image by KateMonkey
