This week’s exploration can be summarized by blurry eyes and a head ready to explode! With many of the photo applications (Flikr, Animoto, Dumpr), I found it difficult at first, to stay focused on educational applications. I figured the best way to experiment was to use personal photos as I don’t have any classroom or student photos. Also, the fact that I have an adorable one-month old grandniece gave me lots of material to play with. I think my own daughter was a little jealous. Having said that, reading Richards gives lots of great ideas and examples of how these applications could be used with images already existing on the web, and how I could offer instruction and examples to classroom teachers. In addition to creating new, innovative and fun lessons for students, these tools offer so much opportunity for collaboration. Whether it is sharing information with parents, showcasing assignments to the community, or working with other students virtually, these applications have so much to offer.
Flikr seemed to me to be the starting point for any applications involving photos. When it came time to start uploading my photos, I think I bit off more than I could chew. I decided to organize an entire Boy Scout Troop worth of photos and quickly reached my limit. I plan to pare down the batch and continue to tag and annotate to realize the organization potential. Lesson learned is that I probably shouldn’t have uploaded all 200 photos at once.
GOOGLEDOCS
Googledocs continues to amaze me. Of all the applications, this one seems to me one that should definitely be part of a Professional Development curriculum. Whether used for student projects or for teacher sharing and tracking, it is something every educator should be taking advantage of.
FREE VS. FEE
Although many of the applications offer advanced features, there seems to be enough free features without subscribing. Since some of the applications have overlapping features, there is a competitive market growing. One example of this is in calendar applications.
THE BIG PICTURE
One thing I struggled with is how all the applications fit together in the big picture. What belongs to Google? What belongs to Yahoo? I believe I mistakenly opened two Flikr accounts one through Google and one through Yahoo. I plan to make some kind of visual chart so I can get them all straight—and also a method of organizing all my passwords, screen names etc. I use a somewhat consistent naming convention but there is still enough variance to make a central list important.
All-in-all, lots of great information this week. On a side note, I loved the Richardson book. It is easy to understand, and provides lots of examples. I can see keeping it by my side quite a bit.
I laughed out loud at your "lesson learned". I hear you on that one! You make a good point about the necessity of keeping your accounts straight.
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