Blog #1: Exploring Flickr....

Blog # 1 – Exploring Flickr

Flickr estimates it currently has over 5 billion photos being publicly shared on its website. Flickr is a website that hosts pictures for basic user accounts, and pictures and video files for ‘pro’ user accounts. From the Wikepedia website I gathered some technical information that described how the Flickr website was created and owned by a Vancouver based company that was later taken over by Yahoo about three years ago.

A popular site for photographers, but an even more popular site for bloggers looking to utilize Flickr’s slideshow application and imbed slideshows of photos within blog posts. It took me a while to understand and even appreciate the reason why this is such a popular function, but now it makes sense.

At first when I was researching what Flickr was, I was apologetically kind of unimpressed that it just held photos and could make slideshows. But when I thought in terms of website production and blog posts, the advantages of an embedded album became clear. If a user wanted to post more than 2-3 photos it would start to look very unorganized and cluttered without a slideshow, album, or folder. Not only does Flickr create the slideshow for you, it supplies the user with the html code required to copy the slideshow into ones blog. If Flickr did not supply this programming code to its users I do not think Flickr would be nearly as popular or as distinguished from other photo sharing sites. Supplying users with the html code for each slideshow makes embedding a slideshow very fast and adds a professional, organized look to a website or blog post.

Next, I will describe my initial experience with the Flickr website. First, I navigated to the Flickr site and set up an account. Instead of setting up a completely new account, I used my yahoo account information to link my yahoo account to my new Flickr account. My yahoo account login information now enables me to log into Flickr. Upon setting this up, Flickr prompted me to add friends from my Facebook account who also have Flickr accounts. It turned out I had 6 Facebook friends who also have Flickr accounts who are now called my ‘contacts’ under Flickr’s terms. Some of these friends were other teachers at school who quickly approached me the following day at work to personally welcome me to Flickr. I was shocked at how fast online actions travel in the real world.

I uploaded my first picture, one of my dog, and it worked great. I was prompted to set the privacy of the picture as public or private. I chose public because it was just a picture of my dog and I don’t care who sees it. It is just a small question but the ‘public’ or ‘private’ setting question definitely makes you wonder who is potentially going to see the photos and what are the associated positive and negative consequences. Yes, I am kind of old-school and feel that people don’t commonly think about the private and public aspects of social webpages until they are prompted about it. I think people should think more regularly about potential pros and cons of public, online photos and comments.

After uploading a single picture I navigated through Youtube to potentially find a tutorial that would help me do something exciting within the Flickr website. I found video showing a step-by-step tutorial which showed the user the basics of Flickr and how to create those sought after embedded slide shows. After uploading some pictures I took around my house, the informational video explained that Flickr works best with photos that contain ‘tags’ which are used to organize or group photos. Once you have tagged your photos, you can hit the ‘create a slideshow’ button. Flickr will then prompt you to list the ‘tag’ name for all the pictures you want to include in the slideshow. After answering with a tag name, the slideshow is completed. The user must then click the ‘share’ button to see the html code that is now associated with the slideshow that was created. Copy and paste this html code into any website or blog post and your slideshow is embedded.

I did a test slideshow and embedded it in my blog within the previous post. My test slideshow was pictures I took of indoor objects that showed some sort of geometrical qualities as a way to get students possibly warmed up to the geometry section of their math curriculum. I feel students would enjoy seeing pictures or any sort of media prior to the start of any unit. I also think the students would be impressed or ‘hooked’ with my use of technology within a presentation. I meant the last sentence to sound sincere and not egocentric. Hopefully it came across that way. I just think students must typically see teachers using old overhead projectors and acetate sheets to deliver material where more technology could easily be present. I couldn’t imagine my students reaction if I plugged in my lcd projector and showed them my Flickr album to help them visualize geometric images. I think they would be shocked and I would enjoy it immensely. I really can’t wait to use my basic Flickr skills within the classroom.

I used the site Wikepedia for the basic information regarding Flickr. Please see the link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flickr

I also used youtube to obtain an instructional video regarding the embedding process of slideshows within websites and blog posts (Mike Bogle). Please see the great link below to the youtube video, thanks Mike:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsJeBBgcByg

Please see my embedded Flickr slideshow below. Thanks. -Regen

Slideshow details....

Hello,

So I was brainstorming on how I could use flickr within a secondary school math class. I came up with some pictures and an embedded slideshow which showcases some pictures that I took within my home that all have a geometry/angle theme. I did not know how to do this 'embedding' stuff before this and just visited youtube for some guidance. I think that this sort of thing would be great within a class overhead presentation.

Flickr Slideshow demo....

Intro Email about me & the process of Setting up a Blog Page...

Hello again,

I'll start with a quick into of who I am. I'm currently a UBC student and highschool math teacher. This blog was set up to help archive my experiences in exploring web 2.0 tools within the UBC course Libe477.

I chose this website over others because I had limited experience with this site in a previous course taken at UBC, and I remember it being pretty straight foward. My memory served me well because it was just as easy to set up as I originally remembered.

The whole idea of a blog is quite new to me. I remember when I first heard about it, I wasn't sure what it was, and never went searching for explanations until I took the one UBC course a few semesters ago. I was familiar with the concept of 'discussion board' and used this knowledge to help me make sense of a blog. In summary, I think of a blog as a discussion board in which I am the owner/editor/moderator of, instead of posting to a disucssion board in which someone else owns it. Hopefully this is an accurate way of thinking about it. Let me know if not.

Looking foward to posting more in the future. The whole blog idea is a pretty interesting concept.
-Regen

Test Blog Post....

Hey all,

Just a quick test to see if this works.
I'll post more once I know that it works.
-Regen