Thursday, August 28, 2008

#6 (WEEK 3) Flickr fun, mashups, and 3rd party sites


Like many web 2.0 sites, Flickr has encouraged other people to build their own online applications using images found on the site. Through the use of APIs (application programming interfaces), many people have created third party tools and mashups* that use Flickr images. Here is just a sampling of a few …

  • Mappr - takes Flickr images and allows you to paste them on a map
  • Flickr Color Pickr - lets you find public photos in Flickr that match a specific color.
  • Montagr – create a photo mosaics from photos found on Flickr.
  • Poster Maker with inspiration sayings (add in any picture and saying)
  • flickrCC - for discovering pictures people have released under a creative commons license
Discover more mashups, web apps, and Flickr tools.

Discovery Exercise:

Your discovery exercise for this “thing” is to: Explore some of the fun Flickr mashups and 3rd party tools that are out there. Create a blog post about one that intrigues you. You might want to check out FD ToysTrading Card Maker.

So have some fun discovering and exploring some neat little apps. If you are up to the challenge while you’re at it, create a trading card of your own. :) or a movie poster or magazine cover from this Flickr site.* Mashup Note: Wikipedia offers some great articles that explain mashups. Basically they are hybrid web applications that take features from one application (like Flickr) and mash it up with another (like a map) In this example, you get Mappr (http://mappr.com)

Curriculum Connections:
  1. Idea #1: Use Flickr toys to make a magazine cover. Many classes make their own magazine. This would be perfect! Example for covers: "Crusade Times," "Heading West," or "Genetics Today." Students could create a magazine cover and headlines for a famous person, historical event, or story character.
  2. Idea #2: Create trading card sets. Liven up mission projects, annual reports, and other topics that are ripe for change. Each student could create a card or student groups could design their own trading card pack. Trading the cards can be a fun game, but they can also be useful for recommended reading, books, illustrators, authors, and historical bios/dates. How would you use them? How about using them as Flash cards for vocabulary, periodical table, foreign language or ELL.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was having huge troubles with these until I realised my over-zealous firewall was blocking heaps of things from loading on the pages. Once turned off it all made much more sense!!

Fiona Watts said...

I particularly loved the poster maker and the trading card maker. I can see a lot of use for the card maker when doing plant and animal identification. Plants particularly can give you a lot of grief when trying to do their ID. By doing these up (time once again would be the issue) and then laminating them you have a carry around resource. + could just carry on your ipod or UMPC and have a set to take with you!

Unknown said...

great idea with the trading cards - if time's an issue perhaps you could get the students to do some of the work for you

Anonymous said...

This stuff is awesome. I've had such fun looking at the magazine covers, posters, trading cards... and creating press cards for my kids which will double as ID cards in case they get lost when we're travelling during the school holidays.

My 6yo son will be amazed at the magazine cover we can use in his photo album to collect all the stories about his year!

On the more serious side, this could be fantastic for team-building - given the right type of team members - as well. The trading cards will be really useful as my team will deal with lots of small organisations - this could provide a ready reference for the key details for those of us with questionable memories!

Another great visual tool is at www.wordle.net - it creates visual word clouds when you copy and paste text.