Thing 8-Playing with Flicker

Well, rest of day spent playing. I can see how one can not only get lost with the gadgets and gizmos, superfluous and minutia; but once all of that fun has been had, there are some real teachable moments here for Art teachers and non-Art teachers . As I stated earlier, Flickr is great for teaching Enduring Understandings through visual imagery. How perfect for introducing big concepts, and making real connections. All students can use what they see here to begin a dialoge visually and through the written word. What better way to evaluate asimilation and synthesis of knowledge? Having said that, I am only at Thing 8--I am guessing there may be a few things I have to learn.

Thing 7-FLICKR-more....

Again, hours of my life, gone, never to be revisited! Ahhh Flickr! Well, I greatly enjoyed looking at everyone's uploaded photos. It did not go unnoticed that many of you have had fun thus far this summer. Many vacation photos...are my lamenting sobs going unheard? Well, back to my ruminations on Flickr. I require my art students to either bring in actual photos (even judging the authenticity of an actual photo is getting very tricky), or post address to adopted photo, before I let them use somone else's work in their own digital art work. I go over Copyright, Karma, and what ever means I can to instill the ethics of using another person's creation. We discuss how one can assimilate and be inspired by another's art, and how that inspiration must act as a "jumping off point" to then create from their own "voice". I work very hard at coming up with creative problems that require specific formats, techniques, juxtapositions...to overcome as much of this misappropriation as I can. (For anyone interested, please visit some of my student's art at: Artsonia.com, Lee M. Thurston High School, Redford, MI.) :)

Thing 6-My favorite thing!! FLICKR

I could wax on and on about how much I love Flickr! It is not just because I am an Art teaher who lives and breaths Visual Literacy! It's not because one can get lost for days, weeks, months admiring, learning, being shocked, surprised, entertained....And, it's not just because anyone would be crazy to not upload every precious photo they take, so that these images are saved in the time and space continuoum of the internet (forseeing the issues of hard drive crashing, lost or archaic disks, and no-back-ups). It is because of all of these and more! As an art teacher I can expound on any theme, principal, element of design, Enduring Understanding, Personal Voice, subject, era, media....I could go on forever! And finally, not to mention the goofy toys, attachments and gimicks that entertain! As to my photo of choice--here is where I lost an hour of my life--I wanted to see what Flickr could do when I typed in ambiguous topics such as "awakening", "path less traveled", "enlightened".... With each phrase came thousands of images! Breathtaking! However, what really did it for me was just typing into the Search bar-"Wow", and look what popped up! Amazing!