Reaction to Richardson Chapter 7

    Richardson (the author whose book I have been chronicling in my previous posts) takes great care in chapter 7 of his book to explore the possibilities that Flickr.com offers in the classroom. These possibilities are things that I had not previously been aware of- I haven't really used Flickr in any meaningful way, outside of a few image searches. Of course, it certainly has benefits of "flattening" the world as a social site, but the feature I am most excited about is the annotation tool.
     Many of the Michigan Social Studies GLCE's deal with analyzing traditions/lifestyles of classical cultures. On a related note, one of the Key Shifts of the Common Core standards is to increase students' ability to cite evidence from a text in making an argument. Flickr's annotation tool seems as though it could be the perfect item to address both objectives. For example, I can envision an assignment where I allow students to choose from a collection of photos related to Ancient Rome, and then have them annotate specific parts of each photo to highlight interesting points of architecture, as well as to hypothesize about what such buildings might have been used for. Similar exercises might be undertaken for an exploration of Neolithic-era stone tools and the like. The possibilities here seem endless, and I am excited to work on ways to integrate this into my classroom.

References: Richardson, W. (2010) Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin