Flickr and Picnik

Every frog's home is his castle

I opened up my account with Flickr, and uploaded my first image which was very straightforward. However, the next day I had all sorts of problems logging in, and I found the help page not very helpful. Anyway, I ended up having to change my password and all is well again. I have now posted this blog and photo directly from Flickr.

With help from Picnik I manipulated my photo. This was great fun and you could spend hours playing around. I found picnik a quick and easy way to resize and enhance your photos. This is particularly useful when you have an image that may not be quite in focus. Students who are not budding photographers (like myself) would perhaps feel more confident publishing their photos knowing that they could use a tool like Picnik to enhance otherwise useless photos.

Placing images in texts not only makes text more interesting, but it appeals to visual learning students (Felder, & Solomon, as cited in Aldred, 2010). Images can be very powerful tool, hence the saying "a picture speaks a thousand words". Students can also absorb learning through searching websites (as long as filtering allows), for appropriate photos to enhance their work in the classroom.

I think another interesting small group activity students could be involved in (as long as just one member of a group had access to a digital camera), would be for students to take a small collection of photos of different objects, that they believed were worthy of photographing. I believe this activity would be interesting on school excusions. The images could then be downloaded at school and a wiki created to highlight the students' excursion experience, where all students could post their photos and accompanying text description to the wiki. What do you think?

"Digital art" (2010), could also provide an interesting learning experience for students where they could manipulate images into different artworks. Again they could showcase their art on a class wiki or blog, being careful not to breach any copyright issues.

References
Aldred, S. (2010). Learning style and personality. Retrieved from CQ University e-courses, FAHE11001 Managing E-Learning,
http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/resource/view.php?id=44149

Digital Art. (2010). Wikipedia: The free encyclopedia.  Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_art#Examples_of_digital_art