My Friend, Flickr

Flickr is something I use frequently, to help me put together things for my students, share photos with friends and next year I'm even thinking of having the yearbook staff have an account so that parents and students can share photos with us without having to bring in a CD or jump drive and having us copy them off.  One of the recent projects I did with one of my classes actually required the student to get an picture of an item that can help show composite area and perimeter as a part of a project they did. We discovered that you can access Flickr from school and look at ad download photos, but you can't search Flickr from school. It's was interesting for them to work around. So a lot of the kids did their photo searching either at home or on their phones, then once they knew of a specific photo they wanted to use, they could retrieve it. Others just used the categories to peruse photos and found something that would work. It was an interesting problem that I hadn't considered because I thought of the idea for the project at home and apparently every time I have done research or created something for my classroom using images from flickr I must have been at home. Then when I was at school, I would click on the link and it went right there. Ahhhhh, the wonder of internet site blockers! I understand the premise, there are images out there that you wouldn't want kids looking at in your classroom, but the filter can make using all these great new web tools very frustrating.