I do a project with my 4th graders titled 'Globally Connected', where they look at the lives of children their age growing up in a country other than our own.
I don't allow students to choose the same country. This usually produces some angst, as most Jewish kids want to do Israel, the Irish kids Ireland, etc. The Korean kids routinely choose South Korea first, and choose North Korea as a distant second place selection only if they have to.
The information sites I direct them to for their research have sparse details about North Korea generally. and even less about the daily lives of kids. But with Flikr...
Simply typing the country's name and the additional tag 'children' yielded an array of compelling, relevant images utterly different than what Google Images yields.
There are additional classroom benefits to using Flikr:
- The annotation tool offers the prospect of running commentary about given images. I wonder if an email address (which many of my young students don't have yet) is the price of admission...
- There is a great opportunity to discuss intellectual property & source citation via the commons.
2 comments:
I love this idea! My fifth graders do a "holidays-around-the-world" powerpoint presentation each December, enhanced with hyperlinks. They can choose "Christmas in... " [the country they came from, or of their ancestors], or another holiday that interests them.
I have students whose parents brought them to the U.S. because they could not celebrate their beloved holidays in the country where they used to live. For example, I have had students researching Christmas in Albania to no avail, because their family celebrated that holiday without the blessing of "the state." Your suggestion to use Flickr images would at least enable them to find photos to illustrate their presentations.
I will also try your strategy of typing in the country's name, then adding the "children" tag. Thanks!
Debby
Very interesting project, and a beautiful photos posted here as well. The vast resource library of Flickr, or Picasa, has a great potential to add to your project.I recently saw a similar project in the Global Schoolhouse project registry [http://www.gsh.org/gsh/pr/index.cfm] to connect students from various countries sharing info about their home countries.
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