To photo share, or not to share? That is the question.

Photosharing is the topic of the week, and it has been on my mind and at my fingertips for the last few days. Not having ever used a photo sharing site, I took it upon myself to check out a few different ones: http://www.flickr.com/, http://picasa.google.com/ and http://photobucket.com/ were the lucky few. My theory was that I could probably handle looking at three different options, but after that, they would all become muddled together.

The Exploration:
Each site offered many of the same options: uploading 100 MB of pics; allowing family and friends to view pictures; editing of pictures, and organizing photos. My journey began by looking at Flickr because that was the photo sharing site that was mentioned in Richardson's book, as well as in Joanne's outline. This was fairly straightforward, as all I needed to do was create a google account. This site had a handy tour that I could take, and while I was taking the tour, I noticed that there were many other projects that could be created on Flickr; two of the most appealing were MOO "tiny, wonderful photo calling cards" and Blurb "bookstore quality books, by you". I can definitely see a lot of potential for these with my English and Social Studies classes, but more about that later.

Next I went on to explore Picasa 3. This site had a very informative video entitled "See what's new in Picasa 3". After the video I was leaning heavily towards using Picasa, but once I entered the site, I found it to be much more advanced than I needed it to be. This site seems to be designed for the more "professional" photographer, who wants to take the time to edit, and adjust photos to perfection. Unfortunately at this stage in my life, this isn't for me, so I decided that Picasa wasn't going to be my choice this time around. Further to this, I wondered about its usefulness with students.

Finally I checked out Photobucket. I was immediately turned off by this site because of the "busyness" of it. I was also concerned by the example photos that are on the first page before you login to Photobucket - one of which is entitled "sexy" and showed some fairly provocative pictures. This would definitely NOT be an option for me, and probably most teachers because even though the potential for students to find inappropriate pictures is always there, it isn't quite so easily accessible.

By Process of Elimination . . .
Flickr became the photo sharing site of choice. This meant that I needed to start playing around with some of my pics. This was incredibly easy, as the "upload" feature immediately connected to all of my pictures on my hard drive. I decided to choose some recent pictures that I had taken while we were at the beach. Then I had to make some decisions about whether or not these would be public photos, or whether they were private. I decided the pictures that didn't include my daughter in them would be public, and the rest were private. Despite the fact that many other people have posted pics of their children, I am still quite cautious.

I proceeded to play around with the pics, and I even posted two of my favourites to my blog. This was also quite easy to do, and made me think about the possibilities available to my English students.

Possibilities Galore:
I didn't really begin to see the possibilities of photo sharing in the classroom until I stopped thinking about how this was going to be great for me and my family. I was quite excited by the fact that I would be able to upload pictures that my both my brothers, one in Fort McMurray the other in Germany, could easily access!

However then I started to think about what this could mean for my students. For my English students there are endless possibilities to use photos to enhance their writing and poetry portfolios - Richardson talks about "Jakes, . . . [who] decided to create an imaged version of the poem 'Chicago' . . . by linking Flickr photos to the more tagable words in the poem." What a great idea! I can see students using this to help them get the creative juices flowing when they are writing. Not only that, I could annotate a picture with notes, which could be useful when doing a novel study and trying to map out the setting.

As for my Social Studies students, I could see how I could use Flickr to create a slide show of places that we will talk about throughout the year, and the mapping function sounds interesting, but I thought that there might be more. So I checked out some web sites and here are just a few that that have some good ideas:

http://www.teachinghacks.com/wiki/index.php?title=Photo_Sharing_in_Education

http://www.teachinghacks.com/files//100ideasWeb2educators.pdf

http://thinkingmachine.pbwiki.com/Think+Photo+Sharing+with+Flickr

What's next:
First of all, I need to become comfortable with Flickr and its possibilites, which I anticipate will be fairly easy, as I am excited about using it. Also, I need to look at what I am going to be teaching, and then start small. I have to come up with a lesson that will only take one period, which is 80 mins., where I can introduce Flickr, and then require students to create a product - perhaps a slide show, that they can share with the class.

Final thoughts:
As I am discovering, there are so many great opportunities available through Web. 2.0 tools to enhance one's teaching, and I am excited about trying to incorporate some of these. The only thing that I keep wondering about is how to access computer time. When I read Richardson's, and Solomon and Schrum's books, I feel excited, yet somewhat discouraged and frustrated that I don't have daily or even weekly access to computers. I feel like we, as educators, are disservicing our students by not having more occassions for them to explore these powerful teaching and learning tools.