Flickr Plugin for Learnerblogs

For our class blog we use Learnerblogs – now I have become slowly more frustrated with what can be added to a blog post, as embedding web 2.0 and other media would be really useful. But I have just discovered this excellent Flickr wordpress plugin for Learnerblogs.

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As you can see from the image above a small Flickr bar is added to the writing screen. The children can add relevant images to their posts that have been uploaded to our Flickr account.

There is also a tag related search option so the children can filter to exactly the photos or images they need. I have also tried to delete the pre-configured username and just do a tag related search on its own and it works. So essentially the children have a way to do tag related Flickr searches right there under their post 🙂 Happy days!

So tagging…I think that this should be something that the children are very aware of and perhaps I can bring in other tagging topics such as del.icio.us.

In my eyes Flickr seems to be developing into a great classroom resource, but I think that the children should be contributing to the class image set as well. I would like them to know the whole process of taking the digital image, uploading to the computer and to Flickr, tagging and naming correctly, organising into sets, geotagging when appropriate, and then using the image in their work.

Lesson Observation Today!

It has been a while but today I was observed by my headteacher and the chair of the governors. So I decided to see what they would make of Flickr notes.

We have been looking at Goodnight Mister Tom and I decided I would setup an image of different objects that represented parts of the story. My learning objective for my literacy was:

To recap on the main events and characters of the story.

Here is the image.

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I then showed the children the objectives which I had added into notes and a short explanation of the activity. I gave the children 2 minutes to talk to their neighbour on the carpet about what they could see and then I asked the individual children to come up and add a note to an object and explain what relevance it had.

The simplicity of the tool worked extremely well and the children had no trouble adding it to the correct part of the image using the SMARTBoard, I then scribed what it was.

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After covering all of the objects I revisited our objective and scrolled over the notes we made and summarised our work together. It was a very successful recapping method which, where appropriate, I will use again in the future.

I have also just discovered how to add links within the notes so that the image becomes quite interactive – you can link to other photos, so you could zoom in to the image to look at closer detail or you can navigate out to a website with information about the subject of the note.