Another interesting tidbit: I love looking at pictures. Especially old or interesting ones. Every time I vist my 92-year-old great grandmother, I peruse through her old pictures that she keeps in (I swear) hundreds of shoe boxes. Even though I have seen these pictures many many times over the years, they never cease to fascinate me. That's why I was so excited to see the Smithsonian and Library of Congress collection of old photographs. There are millions of photographs dating back to the 1800's! I was in heaven! Another thing: I love to travel. However, seeing as I am a college student, I have a very limited budget. Therefore, the closest I get to traveling is looking at travel brochures. I was very intrigued by the places tab. You just type in any place in the world, and any photograph that has that tag will be available. They even have pictures of Clarksville! I can travel to the other end of the world at the click of a button. So to combine my love of travel and old photographs, the photo I decided to upload is one of Brockton, Massachusetts from 1939:
And one from Copenhagen, Denmark, circa 1890:
The one from Denmark is a Photochrom print, which is actually a photolithograph. They were used to capture images at the turn of the century. These images are fascinating to me, and I could spend all day looking through the albums. Both of these photos have no known copyright restrictions because there is no evidence of any rights holder. This is probably because these photos were taken before copyright laws became an issue. I bet the photographers never thought their photos would be accessible to people around the world at a click of a button!
I enjoyed using Flickr, however, I did have some issues. I could not figure out how to upload an image to my blog directly from Flickr. So I ended up just going to the original location of the photograph, saving the image to my desktop, and then uploading the photo to my blog manually. I'm sure there is a much easier way to do this, but I could not figure it out. Also, my links are to Flickr and the image, not just the image. I could never find a URL that ended in .jpg, so I just settled for a link to the webpage. It is also difficult to find a particular photo. For example, in Flickr's "7 Interesting Photos", there was a picture from France that I absolutely loved. I wanted to use it for my blog, but I accidentally clicked off the page, and it was gone! I searched the tag "France", but I came up with over 8 million pictures. No way I was searching through all of those! So I just gave up.
I think Flickr could be a great tool for the classroom. Students would love taking photos and uploading them. An activity could be creating a photo journal for a week. Have students take pictures of their everyday routines for a week and then write blog posts to go along with the photos. This would get students to be creative and also strengthen their writing skills. Also, it would be fun! Flickr is also a good tool that students or teachers can use when researching a topic. If a student is doing a report on the Great Depression and has to make a powerpoint or a poster, he or she could sign on to Flickr, type in the Great Depression, and find millions of great photos to choose from!
Flickr is a wonderful site and I can't wait to explore it more thoroughly!
KBearden:]
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