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Wednesday, January 12, 2011

How Flickr can be utilized to facilitate learning in the classroom


When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices, and demonstrate how these best practices can be applied in the real (i.e. physical) and virtual (online) classroom for both teaching and teacher training. The combination of face to face instruction in a physical setting and online learning is called blended learning. In this section of the blog we will describe how the internet can serve as a supplemental resource for instruction and the mentoring of pre-service and in-service Jewish educators. In this post we will begin our discussion on how  students in a Judaic Studies blended learning classroom can use Flickr  for both individual, group and classroom collaborative writing and for creating new knowledge products such as documents and other files that you want to modify that are on your computer.
Assumption: The teacher or mentor teacher has a interactive white board (i.e. SMART Board, Promethean, etc.), a Tablet PC (also called a Slate or Blade), a computer presenter or computer with internet access attached to an LCD projector in the classroom. It would be ideal if students or mentees had access to their own laptop computers as well.
Note: Although Flickr can be applied in the Judaic Studies blended learning classroom, it can be also be used for training pre-service and in-service Jewish educators for professional or staff development. It is our hope that Jewish educators around the globe will form an online community of practice, a CoP, a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession, to enhance the delivery of instruction and training of Jewish educators. For example, here is a CoP you might want to join. 
Note: Flickr can also be used in a face to face classroom without adding the online component.

What Is Flickr?
According to Wikipedia,  Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.[2] In September 2010, it reported that it was hosting more than 5 billion images.[3]




Where is Flickr located on the web? http://www.flickr.com/

 How can you place the pictures that others have uploaded onto Flickr unto your Flickr account?
To place other people's pictures on your Flickr account you will need their permission. The easiest way to gain permission to add the pictures of others is to learn if their photos have  a Creative Commons License
To see a helpful video on how to upload pictures on your Flickr account by using the Creative Commons License click here.
How can Flickr be utilized to facilitate learning in the classroom?
Here are several links describing how Flickr can be incorporated into the classroom to foster learning.


On the next post we will share a video tutorial I made on how to utilize Flickr in a Judaic Studies blended learning classroom or for staff development.

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