I used to have a Flickr account (I guess I still do, just don't use) when I was "trying" to do 365 Project and creating a Blog to go along with the pictures, but I realized that was one more thing I could not make time for and remember to take pictures. Maybe I will start one at the start of the school year. Anyway, I recently came across to applications that I think would be really useful in the classroom.
Spell With Flickr
- An interesting site that allows you to type in letters. The software will then search through Flickr to find letters that correspond to the text that you inserted into text box. If you don't like the picture it chose for a certain letter you can simply click on the picture to change it. You can also take the image and uses some HTML script to add it to a web page. You can easily incorporate this into a lesson by making it the title of a presentation or assignment for students. You can see a sample below.
Stories in Flight - Flickr Poet
- The idea with this application is you copy and paste in some text and it will search for pictures in Flickr to turn the text into images therefore making it a picture story. You will need to be careful using this software though. I put in the title of a blog, and happiness showed a picture of Guinness Beer. I am assuming that images are chosen from based on the tags that people give them. You can just click the "show story" button till you find pictures that you like.
This could be used for short poems, sections of a speech or historical document. Would be a great way to turn famous quotes into pictures as well. There is a big kick in vocabulary, this would be a great way to create images to correlate to vocabulary that students are using in the classroom, especially for a certain unit of study. I really like this tool for turning words into pictures.