They Called Him Flickr
Isn’t it funny how how sometimes the most meaningful bits of a lesson happen outside of the lesson. This happened to me last night where after a session on Blogs with teachers at a local Primary School we started talking about, of all things ClipArt. As quick as a wink I said “Have you seen this?” and fired up Taggalaxy. Taggalaxy is one on many tools that are now on the web which is a search engine for Flickr. The way it works is that you type in your key word and Taggalaxy finds all of the photos on Flickr which has that key word in its Tags and then presents in using Flash in a globe which you can manipulate with the mouse.
I have seen Taggalaxy used in a few classes but has been particularly useful for senior classes. The classes I have watched have typed in a keyword, “conflict” in this case and then spun the globe to pick a random photo. The students then use that photo as a starting point for their writing. This is great practice for their English exam later in the year. At the very least though Taggalaxy is a great resource for photo’s.
The great thing about this discussion though was that it started an avalanche of other Flickr based sites for the others in the room. Flickrcc is another Flickr search site. The nice thing about Flickrcc is that is is a lot quicker to load than Taggalaxy, but then it doesnt look quite as pretty. 
Enough of these Search engines what about something a little different.
PhotoSoup by Yahoo is an useful example of some of the tools which are now being made for the web. PhotoSoup lets you search according to a keywork or Flickr username and then presents it as a wordfind which you can do online or you can download the puzzle for printing or for use on your Intranet. Just be warned though some of the wordfinds are very hard.
Want something a little easier to come to grips with how about Bubblr, which allows you to search for key words and then create acomic strip from them, complete with Speech and thought bubbles. A whole lot of fun.
A more serious web site is 10by10 which uses photos taken from News Services and presents them on a timeline. So you can find photos which were in the news which were taken on July 29, 2005. Hmmm that could be useful in a senior History class 
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The great thing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg, a quick google search for Flickr returns lots of Flickr based web sites. A good place to start is Big Huge Labs which allows you to make jigsaws and much much more.
If you know of any other Flickr sites which are useful, please leave me a comment with a link to the site…
