Entr Flickr Refreshr

Have you ever had an obstacle placed in front of you that you wanted to conquer? The thrill of the climb? The joy of the hunt? The breaking of the iceberg? And then after diving in, you realized that your obstacle was much larger than you had anticipated? Maybe teaching has been like that for you. Perhaps your school year has been a never-ending uphill climb.

I took a class through CUE and FPU called Web 2.0 Tools for the Classroom. Honestly, that class was an uphill climb for me. So much information had been pushed through this brain and explored with these fingers on this computer that I was feeling exhausted. I had reached that point in Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms as well. I wanted to try all of his ideas, but I was overwhelmed by so much information...and his ideas were supposed to help me save time by using web 2.0 tools!

It’s similar to when my family was hiking up to Scott’s Lake just off the Tahoe Rim Trail outside of South Lake Tahoe. We decided we’d take the boys for their first “man-sized hike”. Shucks, my wife and I had hiked pretty hard core before we had kids. Now our kids, ages 10 and 8 at the time, were finally ready to go hard core with us. We took in God’s wonders, the rocks, the trees, the meadows, the mountains, and our destination was Scott’s Lake.

There was a point where we were kind of done with the whole taking in the scenery thing. Some mountain bikers pedaled past us, and we put on a smile, but I think we were all wishing for the lake, the destination. My limited map-reading skills didn’t help us either: “Oh, from the looks of it, we should get there in about 10 minutes.” Try closer to 45...

It wasn’t until those bikers started coming back down the hill and encouraging us--“You’re almost there!” “It’s just around the bend!”--that we started smiling again. We were tired, but we were making the most of it, working on having a good attitude as we awaited the sight of the lake. Needless to say our feet were sore and needed some massaging action.

And that’s where I was at with Will Richardson’s book. 

And that's about where we are right now in the school year. It's the beginning of April, and we all could use a good foot massage. Ah...enter spring break!

Enter Flickr.com

Flickr is just fun. I have no doubt that when I introduce photo sharing to my students, they will feel refreshed, as I was with Richardson’s chapter. His ideas were straight-forward and engaging. Perhaps it was my visual learning style that was sparked by the visual literacy possibilities within Flickr, or maybe it was the storytelling potential of each picture I saw. I was refreshed. And boy, were we refreshed when we halted our hike at Scott’s Lake! Our shoes flew off, and our sore feet got the foot refresher they needed.

It’s this storytelling that motivates me as a teacher. I want to tell stories to my students, and I want them to be able to share their stories with each other as well. On Flickr, I especially like the idea of using Flicktion, using photos on Flickr as story starters. If you look at a photo, it’s meant as a social tool; it’s meant to tell a story.

I plan to upload photographs to Flickr or Picasa and allow the students to choose one to base a story around. I have done something like this with a Chris Van Allsburg story.I do something like this with a Chris Van Allsburg story. We will work on story elements and writing process as we go.

After my family soaked our feet and put our shoes back on for the hike down the hill, we ended up singing some hiking songs, and we even tried some trail-running. We made predictions on arrival time and had a couple good conversations with fellow hikers. The obstacle had been overcome. Even though it was larger than we initially thought, we persevered and conquered.

The end of Will Richardson's book and the end of my Web 2.0 course was inspiring. I look forward to the end of the school year working out the same way. May the trip down the hill be quickr!