Thing 7

Think of ways you may be able to use Flickr in your classroom and share your ideas. What issues might you face?

Currently, my students are putting together the first issue of the school newspaper. We only have 5 cameras and it has been a real hassle having 140 students taking pictures and having them available for them to put with their articles. Flickr could be a wonderful time saving tool. The students could post the images into a single Flickr account and then access them when they need to. In addition, if they use their own cameras they could post the pics from home so that they wouldn't have to transport them with a Flash drive or with email.

I can be such a pessimist but I see lots of potential issues with using Flickr in the classroom. If students are posting pictures of themselves or others on the web there needs to be parental permission. I know that I have 6 students who cannot have their images posted online. That does not include other students in my building who are not to have their images published on the web. This could create a potential legal issue. Also, having students leave comments on a picture could be disastrous. All there needs to be is a few students (who might not even be in the class) to post a few crude comments. Of course, comments could be closed, or the group could be private but that again has the problem of every student needing an email account to access the site. Sigh, wish the kids had school email accounts. This all could be so much easier!

* Side note: our students are not allowed to "right-click" an image so putting them on flickr for them to insert into their papers wouldn't work anyways.