My Thoughts on Chapter 7 of "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts"

I have to start off by saying I loved reading this chapter; I take enormous amounts of pictures on a weekly basis. Although I knew there were these photo websites out there; I never thought to use them in my classroom. I always thought these websites were for simply sharing pictures with friends & family. For example, many of my relatives live out of the state & recently my cousin, who lives in Pittsburgh, got married. She added her pictures to one of these websites so that those of us, who weren’t able to make it to her wedding, were able to see her pictures. I never knew these websites could go any further than this. I was very excited to see the various ways that these photography websites can be used in a classroom.

One way I plan to use these new ideas in my classroom is with field trips. I would love to take my students on a field trip & have them document their trip with pictures. If my school has the resources, I would group my students & they would be given a digital camera for the day. Then, as we traveled on our field trip they would take pictures of the things they found to be most important. We would then come back to our classroom & add them to Flickr. They would be able to stream their fieldtrip photos together & add captions to describe what they saw & why they thought it was important.

Another idea that was mentioned in this chapter was the idea of the photography field trip. Instead of having my students actually leave the classroom I would have them find pictures & pretend they actually went on a field trip. They would have to find various photos & then write about the place they went. This assignment could obviously be paired with a social studies & language arts lesson! In social studies the students can research a place they would love to visit & then in language arts they would do the writing aspect of it. How exciting!

Last, but certainly not least, another idea I had to use Flickr in the classroom would be to communicate with parents & guardians. I can take pictures of the various things we are making in class or of the various activities we are participating in. I can then upload these images to Flickr & parents to join us. I can stream these pictures together to show parents how their students are growing throughout the year.