Blog #1: Photo Sharing Sites

Inspired! After spending a week investigating photo sharing, I am inspired by the beautiful, stunning photographs and all the possibilities that on-line photo sharing sites offer on both a personal and professional level.

I began by following the trailfire on photo sharing sites created by our professor. It included a link to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_sharing) which offered a good overview as well as a list of online photo sharing sites. I am still not clear on the peer-to-peer photo sharing though and have marked that section as an area to further investigate. The second link was to “The Common Craft Show” (http://www.commoncraft.com/photosharing) by Lee and Sachi LeFever (2007). The short YouTube video was excellent and simplified the reasons to use photo sharing sites and how to use them. On their video it was stated that the two reasons were to keep your photos safe, organized and findable, as well as for the fun, social aspect of sharing photos. I look at my shelves of photo albums and think also about the issue of physical space. At the rate I am going with taking photos, I am going to need to rent a storage locker for them unless I use a digital camera and store them online! Another benefit of photo sharing sites is that you can edit photos and add titles and descriptions (something that I used to do by painstakingly writing on the back of each photo).

The next step was to examine some photo sharing sites. I investigated each of the 17 photo sharing sites that were listed on the Wikipedia article and found that not all were primarily intended for photo sharing but were also to sell photo products. The Kodak EasyShare Gallery (http://www.kodakgallery.com/Welcome.jsp) had some great gift ideas, as did Shutterfly (http://www.shutterfly.com/). Some sites seemed to be focused on private photo collections, while others promoted public sharing. Woophy (http://www.woophy.com/#&mag=1&lng=0.001358&lat=14.016194) was quite interesting with its photo database of the world. The amount of public photos available, specific features, visual appeal, and ease of use were also ways that I compared each of the sites. Webshots (http://www.webshots.com/) had a variety of features but I really enjoyed looking through the collections of the professional photographers. It was good to note that most photo sharing sites stated that they are private by default and that you need to choose through your privacy settings if you want to make your photos public.

After viewing the photo sharing sites, I noted that Photobucket (http://photobucket.com/), Webshots (http://www.webshots.com/), and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) appeared to be the most popular. I chose to use Flickr because it seemed less commercialized than the other two. I began by reading the section “About Flickr” which listed its two main goals, making content available and providing methods for organizing photos, and had photos of the Flickr team. The “Community Guidelines” which outlined the basic rules when using Flickr gave me a sense of security that was heightened when I read the 13 page, in-depth “Terms of Use”. The “Your Privacy” policy did this as well, except for the part about some information possibly remaining in the archival records after your account is deleted. Abuse can be reported easily thereby allowing community policing of the site. It was good to note that there was a Flickr blog which you could subscribe to; as well copyright concerns were addressed with regards to which photos could be used and how to give credit to their photographers.

With digital camera in hand and a full tank of gas, I went for a drive around our small town in search of photos that I could upload onto Flickr. It was an adventure in itself and I was fortunate enough to see a lot of wildlife, including a bear less than a hundred feet away fishing for salmon. I saved these photos to a file on my computer and then logged onto Flickr. After creating an email account with Yahoo!, then a Flickr account, I was able to quickly and painlessly upload a dozen pictures that I chose from the file. One was rotated and two were not very clear, so I edited them on Flickr using Picnik (http://www.picnik.com/). I gave each of my pictures a title and could have given them a description and tags but have not done this yet. Since the titles are specific to my town, I chose only to display one generic image publicly. I also did not “geotag” the picture after reading the warning that Flickr gives when clicking on this feature. After I add more photos, I will organize them into sets and then into collections. There are also many ways to go further with Flickr as outlined in Chapter 7 of Will Richardson’s book “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” (2009). It was at a workshop last winter that I was originally introduced to Flickr. The workshop was fantastic and I did have students access the site when looking for pictures for different projects. However, at that time I did not fathom the potential of this site.

Terry Freedman’s e-book called “Coming of Age” (2006) which I downloaded from http://fullmeasure.co.uk/Coming_of_age_v1-2.pdf discusses photo sharing and clip art on page 33. His idea for using a class Flickr account to create a photo database makes “clipart” much more personal and relevant to students. Also it provides an opportunity to focus on copyright issues. He pointed out that taking photos causes you to “start to notice things more” (2006). I found this to be true as I went around taking photos and am sure this would apply to students looking for photos to demonstrate their understanding of concepts or to add to their projects. He gave the URL to see some of his photos on Flickr. In order to view them though, I used the search box to look up “Terry Freedman”. Once his public pictures were displayed, I opened up his profile to authenticate that it was the same Terry Freedman who had the book “Coming of Age”. This was verified because under his “Public Groups”, “Coming of Age” was listed. I learned about public groups by examining the ones he had created. I was interested in “Flickr for Education” and “Fractions”. Both of these were great and I noticed that I could join them and subscribe to them via RSS feed. Since groups can be private or public, there are possibilities for groups to be used just for a class or on a global basis. To get more information about the groups that Terry Freedman had, I also looked up the top five contributors to his groups and the top five tags.

Photo sharing can be used as part of student portfolios or for samples of students’ projects that a teacher wishes to share with other classes. There are a great variety of lessons that can be created using photo sharing sites. I like the idea of virtual fieldtrips. Learning about Ancient Civilizations is one part of the grade 7 Social Studies curriculum and researching different countries is a part of the grade 6 Social Studies curriculum. Traveling to different parts of the world is not a feasible option; however, it is feasible to view these countries online through actual photographs that were taken by people who have traveled to these places or who live there. Also, viewing great works of art and comparing them to modern interpretations can be done. I searched for “Mona Lisa” on Flickr and found that there were over 22,000 photos tagged as this. Some photos were not appropriate for student viewing though, so it would be best for the teacher to discuss this with students and to choose only those that are appropriate. Choosing tags for pictures is a great way to introduce a lesson on note-taking using keywords. These are only just a few ideas for lessons that I had and there are many more ideas others have that can be found in print and on-line.

A couple of the many questions that I am left with are: What happens if the photo sharing site closes? Why is it that I can view all photos on Flickr at home but at school they are not always there? If you are sharing photos publicly do you/ should you obtain permission of people in photos?