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Flickr has a tool that lets users make trading cards of their favorite pictures. How cool would it be to make a bulliten board for Open House that showcases your students with a trading card of their own? They could fill out the information part with likes and dislikes or some of their interests.

How about another use for this tool? Have students make FLASH CARDS with this site! First step – have students find a picture or graphic for each card they need to make. These pictures are saved and the student needs to remember where they are saved. Then picture is uploaded to the Flickr site using their tool and the student types in the information they want to have on the card and click “create”. Here’s a cool option – the “icon” selector allows students to choose up to seven icons that will go on their card. What I found this to be useful with was specifically when my students were making cards for various cell organelles. If the organelle was specific to plant cells, they chose the “clover” icon. If the organelle was specific to animal cells, they chose an animal icon. And if the organelle could be found in both types of cells, then both icons were chosen.

This assisted the students to not only to study the information they typed on the card, but the icon helped in reminding them which cell type the organelle belong to. What a neat way to help kids study!

You could print up sets of cards based on students’ likes, dislikes and activities from information you have gathered from various “Get to know you” activities and pass them out to students as they come into the room. Then the students can gather into their groups for the lesson based on whatever sorting you wish to use. Example: all students with a musical based card, group one. Nature based cards, group two. People based cards, group three. and so on. The cards themselves can either be positive reinforcers to give to students at the completion of the daily assignment, or collected to reuse another day. Use the icon feature to add more variety to your grouping for future projects.

Flickr has other tools which I’ll post on here in future posts but all of flickr’s tools are part of something referred to as Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is the name given to a collection of sites that are the “next generation” of internet tools. You will generally find them to be free, community developed, and a cleaner look to the site – i.e. fewer ads. Not all of the new sites are something worth your time and energy, but alot of them are really cool and with a little creative thought can be used in the classroom to help you reach your students and teach those technology objectives!

Check out a card I made of my iguana!

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