Travel Diaries of a Web 2.0 Newbie

You’re right – Flickr is addictive. I started off looking for some images to do with DNA, which I’ll be teaching again soon. But then I started the lethal, “Oh, what about this?” and the “I wonder if there are any good images about this?” trains of thought and time had soon whizzed by, again.

I am still a little dubious about the ability of resources like Flickr to supply the kind of visual images I need in my teaching. I also confess to being a little envious of teachers of the Arts, English and other more “creative” subjects, where there does seem to be more scope and freedom to use a wider range of images. However, maybe I need to rethink the way I use images in my teaching: I am remembering the blog post about Powerpoint reform . Maybe a carefully chosen image would be preferable to a slide full of text, dressed up with a catchy font, as it may be useful at prompting more open discussion on a subject.

So, after playing around and getting inspiration for searches using the tag clouds, I decided to be practical and search for “DNA” in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

I found this photo of LEGO DNA, which actually gave me a good idea of how to illustrate the process of how DNA is made when teaching – just need to get lots of little LEGO bits now:

LEGO DNA by mknowles

I found another useful tool for using with Flickr images that allows you to annotate images with notes or links that appear when you mouse over certain areas of the image (Annotated Images – Easy As Pie). Trying to see if it would be useful in helping students understand on which parts of an image they should be focusing, I wanted to try it on an image of a flower, hoping to make it more informative. But then I realised I couldn’t really go around adding notes to other peoples’ photos without asking them first (too impatient), so I looked out a less-than-perfect photo of my own of a flower from my parents’ garden (shown below), joined Flickr, uploaded and then annotated the photo with some of my students in mind (Phew! and all this before my tea!). You can view my attempts here.

Flower! by damicilu

I can envisage using a series of Flickr images to convey a process, such as plant reproduction, to a more visual learner but (as I keep on banging on about) it depends on the images I can obtain. Or maybe I need to get out more and take pictures myself of things that I will want to use. I suppose I’ll just have to try it with different subjects as I go through the year and find out which way works best.