Tag Archives: Flickr

365 photos

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A few weeks ago, I happened across two different references to a blogging project that was called “365 Photos“. The concept is to use a digital camera to create one photograph per day, using an almost-impromptu, aim-and-shoot technique. Some days, one finds oneself putting a lot of thought into a photo, or at least the subject matter. Other days, a surprise opportunity just presents itself. And other times, it might reach 11.58 pm before one realises that the day has almost slipped by without a suitable photo opportunity. The family dog is useful for such moments of panic (even if he’s asleep).

I’ve been uploading the resultant shots to my Flickr account, and assembling them as a cumulative “set”. This also means that I can create a slideshow, as I did a few minutes ago, by requesting an automatically-generated URL from Flickr. eg:

Click here

The slideshow presentation will get longer and longer as time goes on, of course. And there is an option to display captions – or not.

Although I’m doing this as a personal blogging exercise, over on my other blog – and it has certainly ensured that I have no shortage of things to talk about on that blog – I’m beginning to realise there are endless ways to adapt this project for use with a class of students. Not to mention the potential for using it to discuss visual literacy!

I found a great online explanation of “365 Photos” here, and the reflections of its first advocate here.

Blogging controversy Down Under

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Support

Al Upton and the miniLegends 08, an inspirational education blog from a teacher and his Year 3 students in Glenelg, South Australia, has been “disabled in compliance with DECS wishes”, DECS being the Department of Education and Children’s Services of South Australia.

I would hope this is only a temporary closure, during which time the Department will be clarifying some clearer guidelines? I can’t see that sealing off blogs as an avenue for student publication can possibly be a successful longterm strategy.

When I designed a website for a NSW primary school way back in 1997, it was only after uploading it – and seeing exactly how much information about students could be scooped up by the always-improving search engines, even in 1997 – that we, as a group of teachers, began to realise we needed quite a few ground rules to ensure student safety (such as “no student surnames”) – and eventually there were official Departmental memos to follow. At the end of last year, I introduced wiki pages to my new school, and this year blogs as well. I’ve also been trying to ascertain what Web 2.0 style will best suit my Principal, who’d like an easy, efficient way to upload the weekly newsletter.

It’s almost been like the process of discovery has started all over again; only very early days yet, but I’ve worked hard to make sure we cover all our bases. In my research I did find examples of NSW schools which published surnames of students, floor plans, teacher details, etc, on their websites, which was of great concern. Al has hit a problem in South Australia, with a blog that encouraged the fostering of mentorships, and thus a concern, or a perception, that the students may have been (or would be?) revealing too much of themselves online.

Surely the best learning situation for the students, as I said last week, is to have modelled the essential self-regulation of what they upload to a blog: following examples which they can use as a set of strategies at home, when the educators aren’t around to support them. (We can’t assume their parents are aware of how Internet savvy their children are.) I’m constantly amazed with what students already know about the big wide world of the World Wide Web. I hope there is a satisfactory resolution for the miniLegends and their teacher.

As I’ve mentioned here before, we are having great success with our NSW Departmental-sponsored book rap – in blog and wiki form – this term, with an emphasis on jointly-constructed texts, and it’s upskilling lots of teachers, teacher-librarians and students, from NSW and beyond, in the ways of Web 2.0. There’s no stopping these newly-empowered bloggers now, I wouldn’t think!

The very best of luck to Al and his class in getting back online very soon!

Meanwhile, I’m thrilled to report that I received notification from the NSW DET’s Web Filtering Team that my “…reported Incident has been resolved…” My Flickr slideshows are once again available, even if only under a teacher username.

Blocked by a firewall!

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“I hate Fridays!”

Wasn’t there a children’s book with that title?

Last Friday was particularly frustrating. I’ve boasted here about my excitement and successes using Flickr slideshows, but on Friday it all came tumbling down by the NSW Department of Education & Training’s “Blocked site” firewall thingie, which insisted that my site represented non-permitted “file sharing”. I tried several computers before giving up and telling two poor students who’d been away for the previous sessions, “I’ll have to find you a book with the Sydney Harbour Bridge in it.”

Sydney Harbour Bridge

The beauty of the slideshow was that my photo of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was (theoretically) on every monitor screen in the library, had my captions on it, plus room for the students’ new information, and was all totally copyright free! I set up the “slideshow” subsets from home, from my own Flickr account, so I could use it at school with groups of Stage 2 and Stage 3 students studying the Science and Technology unit, Buildings and Bridges, and the HSIE unit, Antarctica. The photos are copyright free (for our study purposes) because I created the bridges images myself, and the Antarctica shots are used with the permission of a teaching colleague’s brother, who actually went there. The whole raison d’etre was to avoid having to use my own username and password to let the students access Google images, which is normally blocked to student use by a Departmental firewall.

The slideshows – and the wonderful captioning feature – have worked perfectly for several weeks now, but not on Friday. However, after Stage 2’s lesson was over, I could still get into my general Flickr account and see all of the pics. Using the whole Flickr account is not desirable at all, because it opens up the whole account. Setting up the slideshow, and using only its unique URL, means that the students cannot view any photos outside my designated slideshow.

Doing a “Web filter check” via the NSW DET Portal this morning, my sites seemed to be designated as “Unblocked” for staff, so maybe the whole system was merely hating Fridays, too, last Friday? To make sure, I’ve submitted the slideshow’s unique URLs for wider unblocking. We’ll see what happens…

Meanwhile, I’ve also found a useful set of webpages via TaLe, called Infamous bridge disasters, the format of which might inspire our proposed wiki page about Sydney bridges, with researched captions written by the students. There is also Building big: all about bridges and West Point Bridge design contest. A wealth of online riches, especially useful when the library’s collection has only about four or five useful books on bridges and other structures – and they’ve been out on loan for several weeks now, even the two I was using to orientate students to the topic that first week.

Later the same day, I received two seemingly-unconnected emails, but both providing positive feedback on my recent Scan article (vol 27 no 1, February 2008, pp 7-9), in which mentioned how I’m beginning to embrace use Web 2.0. Neither person was having the same luck with wikis as I have had so far.

Our school library’s wiki pages are unblocked for staff (as far as I know, all PBwiki sites are), but so far my request for the students to view them (under their own usernames) has not been processed. (I just checked out the “Web filter check”, and its still only unblocked for staff, although I’ve requested unblocking for K-6 students as well.) The students use the wiki (with me and their class teachers) in the library under my close presence, but on a computer logged in under my username. We also have the URL listed on My library, the OASIS Web Enquiry facility, as discussed in Scan but, of course, going that route still meets with the text box requiring a username and password to be entered displaying the wiki pages.

However, at home the students and their parents know they can type in the URL (we promote it in the school newsletter) and see their work on their own computers. We haven’t given out the password for the wiki to the students, of course, so they can’t change anything unless I’m with them.

If a school is planning to have NSW DET students writing material on a school-created wiki, and to have them know the password for altering text, it opens up lots of problems. I guess that’s why the powers that be are overly-cautious. Perhaps we are meant to wait until NSW DET develops its own “safe” wiki facility?

Wikis permit students to communicate with each other in ways not too dissimilar to “chat” programs of several years ago. If a student wrote “School sux” (or worse) on the school wiki, they’d eventually be identifiable, but how do you prevent the incident from happening, or guaranteeing that no student would be exposed to inappropriate material?

One alternative would be to capture the HTML from blocked school wiki pages and upload them to the regular school website area. That won’t permit ease of interactivity, though, but school websites are not(?) blocked to students.

Blocked sites are a nuisance, but there are major problems for the NSW DET if it receives parental complaints when/if students stumble across inappropriate online material at school. But is it so different to a student hiding a pornographic magazine in their locker, a stray female breast in a newspaper clipping, a swear word in a novel in the school library, a tiny animated streaker running across a popular computer-based soccer game, or an underage student sneaking a puff on a cigarette behind the shelter shed?

I guess the problem is, how do you guarantee everything on wiki pages is always safe? You can’t, due to their inherent interactivity.

If anything, attempts at censorship at school always seems to shunt away opportunities for students to learn self-regulation. I’d much rather overhear one student telling another, “I decided not to play that game at school any more. It had guns in it”, and/or “Do you think the Kinders like hearing you use language like that?”, as were recently said in the library one lunchtime.

Speaking about wikis: unless your access is blocked by an annoyingly inconvenient firewall, check out the current NSW DET book rap, which has a fun wiki activity. The teachers and their classes are all at early points in their steep Web 2.0 learning curve, but surpassing all of my expectations, and even teaching me new skills.

It pays to network

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Sometimes I network with other teachers and students without realising it, and it’s fantastic when it pays off.

One of the advantages of collaboratively programming and planning lessons with each Stage group at school is that I can adapt each library activity to suit the various classes, taking into account the need to share available resources, and how best to complement the learning styles of the students and the teaching styles of their teachers.

Essentially, though, the lessons are repeated several times in a week – albeit with variations. By the end of the week, I’ve usually mastered my patter that leads into the activities. I also like to keep every stage informed about what units other stage groups are studying, simply because one never know when networking possibilities will arise. In fact, in my last school, I kept a large noticeboard in the library foyer – updated, week by week, as to which unit of work, key learning area or KLA, and type of text each class was being focused upon during their library lessons. (I’d do it at my current school, if only we had a noticeboard in the right place.)

Last week, no matter whether intending to use the Chinese New Year Parade photos (taken for Early Stage 1 and Stage 1) or the Bridges photos (taken for Stage 2), I recycled the same jokes with each class (ie. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have time on Sunday to get to Antarctica to take some photos for Stage 3…”). I’m so glad I did, because one teacher announced that her brother had just returned from a vacation to Antarctica – and had CDs filled with photographs of… icebergs, Antarctic cabins, icebergs, penguins, more icebergs, humpback whales, and did I mention – icebergs!

What a lucky break! And so, I was able to add a third slide show to my Flickr account, called Antarctica which the Stage 3 students will be able to use this week without worrying about the copyright of other Antarctica photos they may have found on the Internet!

As I said, it pays to network. Or rather, it often pays to be loquacious, because that can lead to very effective networking.

At point of need…

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Dragon and lion dancers

They say that teachers are most effective when we convey strategies for accomplishing tasks in explicit ways, and preferably just prior to the point of the learner(s)’ need – which is when they are most likely to be open, motivated and goal-oriented. A looming deadline probably helps as well. I don’t have any pithy, fancy quotes at hand, but it’s the style of teaching that I’ve honed through many years at PSP (Priority Schools Program), formerly DSP (Disadvantaged Schools Program) working environments, plus via my training and practical experience as a teacher-librarian.When these findings match up during my own learning, and my own readiness to learn (not to mention motivations and goals), I only cements my confidence that I’m on the right track. I wasn’t ready to learn about wikis until I was ready to teach about them. I wasn’t ready to learn about abseiling until I was ready to help students learn how to do it. I wasn’t ready to learn to ride a bicycle until – well, no need to go into that anecdote. The ducks in Centennial Park haven’t forgiven me yet.

On Sunday, knowing that Early Stage One and Stage One were to be studying Chinese New Year this week, and Stage 2 was to be studying Buildings and bridges, I went into the city with a borrowed digital camera and took lots of photographs of the Chinese New Year Festival Parade, plus assorted Sydney bridges. My intention is that we will use these images to create some wiki pages, and some group-negotiated, well-researched, descriptive captions (using SCUMPS, but more on that later). How to get the Photoshopped images available – and guarantee having access to them at school – for Monday morning’s classes, especially since I use an iMac at home and several, variable quality PCs at school, none of which seem to like my Mac-altered images or memory sticks?

The obvious answer was to upload the photographs to my Flickr account – to show them as a slideshow – and to finally learn how to shunt thematic images into special folders. It was all so much easier than I expected – so why was I so hesitant all these months/years? (We don’t have an interactive whiteboard at school yet – but I can already imagine some of the ways I will be able to use the board with students and teachers.)

The two lessons worked extremely well. I set up a Flickr slideshow on adjacent computers (Bridges – Stage Two or Chinese New Year K-2), and selected student volunteers to manipulate the mouse that would kept the slideshows progressing. I explained to the students and their teachers that we would be setting up a SCUMPS matrix (stay tuned!) on wiki pages so that groups of students could collaborate on descriptive factual writing into each of the matrix cells, which we’d then upload to the Internet at the touch of a mouse. That’s the plan, anyway. Who knows where this may lead once the students and teachers have their input?

I’d just finished patting myself on the back for accomplishing my goals, and started to head off for lunch, when a new staff member asked about looking for particular resources in the Teacher Reference section of the library. I almost set him off to the correct shelf, with a mere finger point, when I realized that, since he was suddenly at that “point of need” (and, under normal circumstances, I’d be at lunch), I’d do a quick bit of explicit teaching – and demonstrate OASIS Web enquiry for him. It was very successful, brief session, and we located better resources than if I’d relied on my memory, or the luck of random shelf-browsing. The teacher was excited about testing out remote access to from home, using the My library hyperlink on his Portal page.

Also, coincidentally, I happened to see a reference to the second annual ALIA (Australian Library and Information Association) Library Lovers promotion on the upcoming Valentine’s Day (thanks Victor over at the nswtl listserv) on the 14th February. Somehow, I managed to overlook this quirky event last year and, at first, I thought it a rather dubious connection, attempting to cash in on Valentine’s Day. But then, thinking back to my impromptu demo lesson on OASIS Web enquiry but I suddenly realised that holding a Library Lovers morning tea for the staff on Thursday will finally secure me the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the new web tool to the whole staff at once. Up until now, I’ve only been able to do a few 1:1 orientations (at point of need), but without a firm deadline – ie. my own point of need – I guess I’ve been procrastinating, and all staff members do need to know about Web enquiry.

I quickly cleared the event with the Principal, and made up the invitations on pink paper, using the graphics supplied on the ALIA website. One of the staff chuckled over her invitation, “Cool! It’ll be the only action I get on Valentine’s Day. My husband’s in Victoria this week.”

Oh – and I should point out that, yesterday, I didn’t have hyperlinks to reply upon to use my slideshows and I was trying to prevent the students scrolling into my other (very off-topic) Flickr photos. It was only in the wee hours of this morning that I realised that Flickr would permit me to quote separate URLs for themed sets! Another exciting discovery that will greatly improve today’s activities (ie. the next two batches of guinea pigs, er, students).