Photo Sharing

I'm preparing for a discussion at the Project IDEAL conference tomorrow about social media tools. All I need to do at this point is add a few examples and links, but it's impossible to do this fast! Every link leads to many possible bunny trails, following one link to another, learning interesting things that may or may not have anything to do with the task at hand. Is this ADD, or multitasking?

I'm reviewing some of the projects created in July and August for the discussion of Social Media in Adult Education, and I'm still surprised at the richness of the discussion. I didn't participate in the photo sharing group, but now I'm looking at their projects linked from the wiki. They created a group on Flickr and had quite a bit of discussion within that group, apart from the list. There are lots of ideas about how to use photo sharing in instruction, especially for ESOL. Illustrations of the alphabet, of everyday interactions (not the happy shopper paying the happy clerk, as one person said), of cooking and canning, of prepositions, of favorite shoes, favorite clothes. The list goes on, and the photos could be collected by teachers or by students. A teacher could create a closed group, where only students in one class could add photos and posts, or the group could be public. Maybe I shouldn't still be amazed at the possibilities of social media, and at the endless creativity of teachers, but I am.

So while I'm at it, I'm going to brag on the blogging group. We had a blog to explore blogging, which has links  to the blogs created by the participants. I had 23 people sign up for this group. About 10 actually responded to messages, and 6 created blogs. When I came back a few weeks later, three blogs were going strong and have posted something new in the last day or two. These are good projects, and they're putting me to shame. I better get busy! This may not sound like a good percentage of success, but it's summer, no one is getting paid (group leaders or participants), so this is all a labor of love.

And there were a couple of wonderful posts from Jayme Adelson-Goldstein about being a lurker. She explained how she followed the discussion, did her own projects, but didn't have time to respond on the list. She illustrated the fact that "lurkers" are not always passive observers. Many are using the materials to suit their own needs and professional development, but not posting about it. There are 1400 people on the adult ed professional development list, so if 6 people actively participated in each of 10 groups, and another maybe 150 to 200 participated in some non-public way, that makes it worth the effort!

Aviary!!

Aviary is a whole suite of media editing tools - online and free. I have a new computer at home with Vista on it, and I was thinking I would need to buy PhotoShop Elements or something like that to edit my photos, but I got a free invite to the beta of a.viary.com and it's great! It's not PhotoShop, but I don't need anywhere near that level of complexity. I just want to resize, rotate, crop, adjust brightness, etc., and a.viary did everything pretty easily. Go there and sign up for an invite. They will send you three so you can spread them around. Be sure to look at some of their examples.

Flickriver

Saw this on Twitter also, a site that searches Flickr and serves up the photos in a seemingly endless stream. I searched for the tag "eggplant," probably because I had some really delicious Thai eggplant the other night, and got a stream of photos that included the color eggplant and many plates of eggplant cooked various ways along with the vegetable itself, but what I nice way to find images. Here is my eggplant stream. I also tried egret, ballons, and henna. What would you look for, or what would your students want to see?

You can save your search results as a link, which could be handy. Let's say you're teaching about Presidents Day. You could get a stream of Lincoln photos and show them while you are introducing some information or an activity.

And just for fun, check out FlickrVision. Like TwitterVision, it shows you on a map of the world where photos are being uploaded, with a thumbnail of the photo that you can click on the make it larger. This is I guess a lesson in how small the world really is.

Library of Congress Shares Photos

Just saw this blog post about the Library of Congress doing a project with Flickr. They are posting thousands of photos that have no known copyright. Some are missing info, and they are hoping people will annotate them and add comments. There are some great photos here, that can be used by anyone! If you add their Flickr site as a contact, you will be able to see whenever they add more photos.