Flick & Digital Photography

If anything, my new flickr.com account will give me a place to keep all of the photos I use in my class, and plan to use with my class in the future. I have a ton of photos on my iMac and a ton as well on my laptop. After my wedding a couple years ago I took a month of that summer archiving all of my photos and videos collected throughout the years, and backing up all that info was very time consuming. But it also gave me a chance to reconnect with many images I hadn't seen in years, and now that I can easily locate all of my old photos and video clips, I have a place to upload the ones that I'd like to share.
I've also recommended flickr.com to the 8th graders at my school working on a yearbook. They had been taking photos on their digital cameras and emailing their shots back and forth to each other. But as you could imagine, with 8 or 9 people taking pictures, that was alot of emails, alot of images on already slow-running computers. Making sure that the site wasn't blocked on the school computers, I told them if they each got an account at flickr.com they'd be able to share their photos with each other the instant they're uploaded to the site. I also explained that if they were nerdy like me and labeled the photos well when they saved the file that would be uploaded to flickr it would make the pics much easier to label once they were done being uploaded.
I was pleasantly surprised when I uploaded my first photos how the file name I saved them as was automatically in the description box for that photo. I also liked the ease of flickr to organize and label all of the photos individually and in sets as well. There are so many possibilities for the use of the Creative Commons photos in the classroom, and the countless ways students can tag and label their own photos, or find photos that are interesting to them as well from all over the world is pretty powerful. My students would have a great time taking the information they collect in science or social studies class to annotate a picture for other classmates to learn from.
I've only had time to upload some photos from my home computer of my family to give the students and example of my home life and what's important to me. I will be asking them to do the same with pictures they really love of their family. The kodak photo program I used exported the pictures in a form the program called, "best for the web." I think they look a bit dull, and blurry even, so I'd have to say the next batch I upload will be saved at a higher resolution. Check out my first album at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/herman75/sets/72157623638963422/