5 reasons to use Flickr for class photosharing

These days most classrooms have digital cameras and/or devices that are capable of taking photos. But what happens to those photos?

Do they stay on the teachers hard drive or school internal server never to be seen again?

If a picture can tell 1,000 words, how much richer will your learning stories be to your students and their families if they are out in the open for everyone to see.

Enter photosharing sites like Picasa, Photobucket and Flickr.

These websites are places for you to store, share and most importantly organize photos publicly with your community.

I’ve been using Flickr  since 2006 to store my 10,000 image strong photo collection. I pay around $25USD a year for a terrabyte of data. When I became a responsible for a class it seemed logical for me to have a class Flickr account to share photos with my parents.

Here’s five reasons you should be using Flickr to share photos online.

1. Sharing without clogging up inboxes
Rather than sending out photos as attachements that get lost with other bits of mail, Flickr is a great way to keep your photos organized and easy for your students and their families to enjoy. When you upload your photos, you can sort them into albums or sets. I keep my photos organized by event. You can even keep the same photo in several different sets so you could potentially have a folder for each kid as well as events.

2. Making space for reflection

When my class has big events, like say cross country, rather than sit through a long boring slideshow through a central monitor they can gather around a screen and talk about those moments with their friends. Sharing moments becomes a lot more realistic and the kids can skip past pictures that don’t hold their interest.

3. Ease of publishing.

Flickr has mobile phone apps (the iOS one rocks the house) and an inbrowser upload where you just dump photos and publish. However the big draw for me for me is posting via email. If kids have a photographic home-learning task, then you can create a special email address and the student can simply email the flickr account and the image is automatically uploaded.

4. Ease of sharing

Being away on camp, I could easily share images back to school and to my parents of camp without blowing my 3G connection. Flickr enabled my photos to be shared across the school community even though I was away from school. What’s more when the kids are writing a recount of a class event, they can go to flickr find a picture of the said event grab the code, and then embed the image into their story bringing that event to life for the child.

5. Library of creative commons images

One of the most awesome things about Flickr is that you can enjoy other people’s photos. Because my students already know about Flickr and how to embed photos, they can search out creative commons images for other tasks using Flickr’s search opening a vast library of images available for reuse. Obviously with anything on the internet that kids can stumble upon offensive content. Posting nasty stuff to Flickr is strictly against the community guidelines but it doesn’t mean that this never happens. There are precautions you can take though. Every photo has a place where you can flag the image as inappropriate or you can simply report a user or content to Flickr. The site is also monitored quite well and Flickr will shut down accounts that break the rules.

Before you jump in…

Obviously you do need to check your school’s policy on posting student images online before launching and account. I’m pretty lucky that in the past two years I’ve only had one student’s image not able to be published and that was only for a term.

There’s also an issue around blockage as a lot of internet filtering services block Flickr because it is a social media site (in fact Flickr was blocked at my school for a number of weeks when the filtering software was changed which annoyed me to no end).

Don’t forget about money. Personally I consider the cost of pro account worth it in terms of the amount of storage you receive in comparison to the free version but it’s up to you.

Finally don’t forget to have a conversation with your community about how you licence your students images.