Using & Teaching Educational Technology
Flickr Toys (not): Annotating a photograph
By Terry Freedman
Wed, 21 Jun 2006, 22:57

This is not a "Flickr Toy", but I've included it in this series anyway because it has such potential in the classroom...

Some years ago (in 1998 to be precise) I took a photograph of a street scene, and uploaded it to my website as an example of how a teacher might use a photograph to assess pupils' understanding in a fun kind of way. In the exercise I suggested, they had to say where the use of technology was implied or explicit in the picture.

Were I to repeat the exercise today, I should use the Flickr annotation facility, which you can see in this screenshot (indicated by "Add note").



You simply display the photo you'd like to annotate, then click on "Add note". You'll see a frame with handles, which you can move around and resize.

Once you've drawn a frame around a section of the picture, add some text and save it.

In my example here, I've decided to analyse a bus stop to help foreign visitors to London understand what it's all about. (Go on, click on the pic, and then pass the mouse over the picture in Flickr!)



I could equally have drawn boxes with only numbers in them, and asked them to enter text, or match the numbered parts of the photo with some text I'd prepared.

Or I could have asked them to decide for themselves what the important elements of the picture were.

Another use is art history.

As is often the case, the only limiting factor is ones imagination!

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© Terry Freedman Wed, 21 Jun 2006