Perhaps you all have encountered this before but this is a first for me.
Looking out the window of my office in downtown L.A. one has a great
view of the billowing clouds of smoke coming from a fire that broke out
in the Griffith Park area of Los Angeles a few hours ago. Wanting to get
more information about the fire and in particular about how it might be
affecting freeway traffic for my commute home, I googled "fire in
griffith park" and in addition to some news reports, found a link to a
local weblog that said "People are putting up photos all over Flickr.
The tag is here." Clicking on the link brought me to
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=griffith+park+fire&s=rec
<http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=griffith+park+fire&s=rec>  which indeed
claims to have some 300+ photos posted already.

I got to wondering about how this could all be used in a teaching
context, especially in light of recent discussions in this forum and
others about incorporating mobile technologies into adult education.
What if teachers worldwide, communicating through email, set up a common
assignment such as "Sometime today, post pictures to flickr (or some
other website that allows photos to be posted directly from
cellphones)of a family doing something together and tag the photos with
the same descriptor which is "Family Activity ESL" or something very
specific." Students would then be sent out to capture images on their
cellphones as homework and they would send them directly to the flickr.
The next day, all of the students could type in the search term to see
the images that were posted from all over the world and use them as the
basis for discussion or writing assignments in their own classes or
between classes or individuals worldwide...

Just thinking outloud here...

Barry Bakin

Pacoima Skills Center

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/technology/attachments/20070508/fbc3983b/attachment.html