Creating Short Photo Stories Long On Creativity and Ideas

I've lost count on the number of times I have presented Flickr as a tool for the classroom. I learn something every time, whether it's a lecture presentation or a hands-on workshop.

This past Monday, October 6, I led 11 teachers and librarians in a 2 hour Flickr workshop at the Midwest Instructional Technology Conference (MITC) sponsored by MOREnet. A few things went very right with this time. I submitted this session for intermediate level attendees and required that everyone come with a Yahoo! ID and password and a flash drive with at least 20 photos or a digital camera. Anyone who knows me knows that I have often repeat the mantra "embrace the beginners," but sometimes it is a nice to change work with a group who have the basics mastered and the technology becomes secondary to the topic at hand. Does this mean I will stop proposing workshops for beginners? Of course not!

The workshop was scheduled for 2:00-4:45 p.m. with a 45 minute break from 3:00-3:45 p.m. in one of the conference computer labs. Once we got rolling, the majority of our time was spent going over the features directly from the Flickr website. At 3:00, I told the group it was time for a 45-minute break which no one opted to take, so we continued. By the end of 2 hours we had accomplished everything I had hoped to accomplish including posting visual stories to Tell a Story with 5 Photos for Educators.

The group now has 114 members and 57 stories. Monday's group used the photos thay brought or spent time during the session to take photos to create their 5 photo stories. Check out the new stories (or the older stories). I am always at the creativity teachers show in their work - especially near the end of a two-hour workshop.

As a side note, I used jog the web to create a Web 2.0 hotlist "Discovering Flickr for the Classroom" for the workshop. Although I did not use it during the presentation I certainly like it for collecting websites and having them live for review after the presentation.