Saturday 6 March 2010

Using Flickr as a Montessori resource

I love Flickr, it is a great way to store my pictures and share them with everyone, with the advantage of having different levels so you can make the pictures as private or public as you like.
We live in a small town and the town library isn't really up to much and obviously it is all Japanese, I would love to buy books for everything that Ebi-kun is interested but we don't have the space or the money, so this is my latest trick...Flickr.

Go to Flickr's main page, here. Then click on the search link....

Now click on the advanced search link....
Which will bring you to this page, now you can fill in what you want to search for and make sure your search is safe, although this is not 100% fool proof it is the best way to go, you can also set other search restrictions here. If you are looking for images to use other than just looking on screen you can select creative commons which is at the bottom of this page (couldn't manage to get it on the screen shot).
Then click the search button at the bottom of the page, that will bring up a new page full of images, click on slideshow and sit back and enjoy the show.
Ebi-kun is loving this, there are so many beautiful images but then you get the odd everyday shot thrown it too. I think this gives a better representation of a country than a book on say Canada. With Flickr you are seeing it through many peoples eyes and the range of subject matter is much greater.
Obviously this doesn't always work fantastically, I tried doing the same for polar bear and got some very odd images but some of those included images of blokes with 'I am a polar bear' written on their chests, this led to a discussion about why these fella's had done it, from the caption I could tell it was a global warming demo.
Do you use Flickr? If so, how do you make the most out of it?

4 comments:

  1. personnaly I never thought of using FLickr but this is a great idea.I go to the library every week ( not far from where we live and they have a good selection of english and french books but other languages) thanks to the federal gvt;)
    ONe question, can we use flickr to do nomenclature cards? Is there any copyright constraint on using flick for montessori material?

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  2. if you check the creative commons there are various rules and regulations on what you can and can't do.
    Personally - I think if you use pictures to print out and use just at home then there is no problem, I think the problem arises if you start to share images or to sell them.

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  3. I use Flickr a lot for my blog, but recently we had a great time looking at photos from Eritrea - I had just finished reading a wonderful history of Eritrea by Michaela Wrong (highly recommended, even though history books aren't usually my first choice for reading) and wanted to see some images of Asmara and the countryside so I pulled up Flickr and set it to a slideshow of everything labelled Eritrea or Asmara - it was an amazing selection of photos and my husband and I were mesmerised for over an hour! Like you say, as the photos are taken by ordinary people (to a large extent) you get a very real flavour of the place you are looking at.

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  4. hmm, I will have to go and have a look now...

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