Flickr has been actively promoted on several of the education blogs we follow (e.g., Ed-Tech Insider, Education/Technology) and we use the site ourselves. As a consequence, Cindy has added a Flickr activity to the course she teaches for future teachers. However, as she spent more time exploring Flickr policies, she has discovered that there are 18+ groups and nudity is not banned. It is no surprise that you can find pretty much anything you can imagine on the web and Flickr was certainly not developed to focus on the K-12 audience or educational applications. However, schools tend to actively screen material that is considered inappropriate for students. What is the sense of promoting activities many teachers will be unable to implement? Do schools block Flickr?
When learning that I had a blog and taking a look, a vendor (my term for those folks who sell stuff) described my site as “mature”. I think this was a compliment (Note: I am working on not reacting to any reference to my age.) and I think the message was – “you have been doing this for some time”.
I am attempting to embrace the idea of “maturity” and consider what might be done to take advantage of this condition/state. I describe this site as an attempt to “learn aloud.” What this implies to me is that I “externalize” some of the experiences I have so a) I have a record I can find and explore when potentially useful and b) others have a resource they can explore if they are interested.
I have thought the “search” feature of the WordPress blog software would do, but I have noted that some of the big time blogs categorize posts. The opportunity to label entries did not appeal to me previously because there was not that much content here to work with. I have since reconsidered. Here is the scheme I am now considering –
General – a catch-all category for things that do not fit elsewhere
Ed practice – comments on activities and strategies
Research/policy – comments on research findings or policy satements.
New software – comments on Internet or CPU-based applications
Rants – well, you know – “complaints” – hopefully done with a little humor to take the edge off
The blog software I use allows me to go back in time and categorize previous posts. This is not a high priority for me, but I will spend a little time just to see what the results look like.
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