Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts (ch 7) Reflection

Flickr seems like an interesting tool and a great way to share your photos with multiple people.  I would find this type of technology most useful in finding pictures that people you went on a trip with had posted.  This way you can easily access photos of things you may have wanted to take pictures of, but were unable to for whatever reason.  From an academic standpoint I don’t know how useful this tool would be to me because I want to teach secondary science.  The examples given in the book were mostly about writing stories or illustrating stories with pictures you can find on Flickr.  In most science classes, there is not a lot of story writing going on and if pictures were needed to illustrate a paper or project you can always find images on Google or other websites.  There were a couple ideas that I thought could possibly be used in a science class and one was using the annotation tool to insert comments about certain objects into a photo.  This would be a good way to get students to use technology to explain the parts of a picture and how it is relevant to whatever they may be researching.  I also thought it was interesting how you could link pictures to Google Earth to see what other pictures had been taken at the same spot.  It would be interesting to see what other people had taken pictures of at the same site that you were at, or what other angles the same thing you took a picture of were taken at.  You could use this feature in a geography class to look at the different landforms that people thought were interesting in a certain place.  Flickr seems like a good tool, but honestly I don’t think that as a teacher I will use it.  I feel there are easier ways to find pictures and use them in projects or presentations and there are other programs that can be used to make presentations that I am already familiar with.  If I had to use this website I would be more than willing to learn how to use it and implement it into my classroom, but at this time I am not really excited about using it as I was with some of the other tools we have talked about in class.  I don’t think it will be as useful as some of the other technology we’ve discussed and would rather use a few tools to their full potential instead of lots of tools at minimum potential.