I’ve challenged some of my colleagues to take the 23 Things challenge to become more invested in online learning this summer. This website includes a 10-week game plan for learning some online learning and presenting methods that are useful for teachers, and that are appropriate activities for the age group we teach.  There are other 23 Things lists out there, I know, but this is the one that we’ve chosen to work with, and that I’ve decided to complete.

The previous entries in this series are here:

1. Getting Started
2. Discovery
3. Setting Up a Blog
4. Starting with Flickr

The goal for today is to use some of the “fun Flickr apps” to do something with a photo or group of photos from Flickr.  And here, I’m at a loss. The links to the tools suggested, like Mappr and Moisaikr don’t actually work any more. One hasn’t worked since 2007; the other works, sorta, but the code seems to make it impossible to use your own photos as the basis for the work.

However, I did find a way to make one of those motivational posters using the Al-Baldah image I created using Chris Warnock’s book on the Mansions of the Moon.

I have no real interest in buying such a thing, unfortunately. I could make them again in the future, though, or use CreativeCommons images from American history or elsewhere to make Palace of Memory posters for my teaching or my workshops.

I also learned that I could have photo business cards made from my images, and greeting cards, by Moo.com. Should I? My success with selling my Geomancy poster or my pagan chant mandala t-shirt on Zazzle.com has been a big zilch.

My usual search skills are not proving very helpful; I did find this memory game tool, which allows you to pick a tag and then use that tag as a way to train the memory.  I’ve not thought how to use this in the classroom yet, but one possibility would be to use it as a way to teach kids to learn about a subject of study before doing a deeper bit of research.

One of the few tools I’ve found is this one, though, which is kind of disappointing even as it’s accurate.   It compares the frequency of a photo’s views with the length of time that it’s been available (how long since it was uploaded).  And what’s disappointing about it is not that it’s inaccurate — but that my photos are not broadly received. Alas.  Not really on anyone’s radar but mine. None of my photos in the last two or three years have seen much use or collected much interest.    And here’s another list of tools for Flickr.

Oh well. It does give me the ability to keep track of all my art projects, and that’s been useful.

Beyond this, though, in doing explorations of Flickr toys, I’ve found that a lot of the tools require me to hand over user names and passwords, and this is a security issue for me.  If it’s not a tool that I can use without providing the keys to my artistic history, I’m not sure I want to use it.

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