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.
