 This week, I'll show you a bunch of sites that center around the mother of all image hosting sites: Flickr. Flickr is a powerful site that has many tools to explore all on its own. It supports social networking, print ordering, works seamlessly with blogging accounts, and plays well with 3rd party sites. Here are some of my favorite sites that work well with classroom integration and help extend the Flickr Fun.
- The Library of Congress' Photostream: This stream offers two very large collections, "News in the 1910s" (over 3000 photos) and "1930s-40s in Color" (over 1500 photos) showing life during the Great Depression and World War II. The latter are rare (color!) and gorgeous photos taken from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI). Viewers are invited to tag and comment on the photos, as well as add identifying information. It's a great site for teaching History or using as "story starters" in Writing.
- Spell with Flickr. Great for making spelling words interesting, simply enter a word at this site and it will bring you back a photo representation of each letter in the word. Suitable for printing or embeding in a website or blog. Here's a similar site that will use Flickr photos of numbers to tell the time: Clockr.
- Textorizer. Point this site to one of your Flickr photos (or any image, really) and type in what words you'd like to use, and it will turn the photo into a drawing made up entirely of the words supplied. Beautiful!
- Mosaickr. Create stunning mosaic pictures from your Flickr photostreams. Take a class picture and have it made up of 100s of pictures of the students from throughout the year. Web-sized pictures are free, but you can purchase poster size as well.
Here are some great sites to present your photostreams from Flickr (suitable for blogs or on a dedicated Web site):
- Bookr. Give this site the Flickr account name and the tags you want included and it will build a virtual book with "turn-able" pages and an area for text to be entered. Once finished, you're given a website to share with others.
- Splashr. Splashr lets you create interesting slide shows with many themes to choose from that can be used as stand-alone sites or as embed-ed slide shows for your blog.
- Cooliris. This is a site that integrates with Flickr (along with most other sites). It requires a download/install into Firefox but provides an amazing virtual "cinematic" way to present your photos.
- Biscuit Tin. Biscuit Tin is just as fun as Cooliris to show off your photostreams. Simply type in the Flickr user name, and your photos randomly stack up into piles that can be spread and arranged all over a "virtual" living room floor.
When searching for other people's photos on Flickr that are graced with a Creative Commons license (CC), there are a few tools perfect for finding photos that will compliment your existing color scheme for your Blog or Web site:
- Color Fields Colr Pickr lets you manipulate a color-slider and brings in random Flickr photos that match.
- Flickr Color Selectr. With this site, you can specify your exact colors by typing in the RGB Color Hex codes, so it makes it even easier to find photos to compliment your web-site's color scheme. Again, the offering are with Creative Commons licensing.
Need to download your Flickr photos from the Flickr site quickly? Use Flishr for Windows machines (Mac version coming soon) or Flump for Mac (Windows as well!). These tools are just the "tip of the iceberg" for what's out there for Flickr, with new ones sprouting up almost daily. I invite you to add to this list in the comment section below.
 Bob Sprankle has been a multi-age teacher in Wells, ME for 10 years and has served as the school's Technology Integrator for the past two years.
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