Flickr and Picnik

It has taken me what seems like a huge amount of time but finally I have been able to upload this photo of my dog Dudley to my blog. This may sound like an easy task for most people however it was a big achievement for me. I found the use of Flickr quite easy, just followed the online prompts and my account was created. For educational purposes, Flickr could prove to be a valuable tool allowing students to upload and use images for various ICT tasks.

I uploaded this photo to Flickr from my computer and in order to edit the photo I was redirected to a site called Picnik. This site is free to join and easy to use and allows you to make basic alterations to your images. Once there I managed to crop and resize my photo and when I was happy I saved it. At this point it was not clear what I needed to do in order to put this photo on to my blog. I tried copying and pasting the URL into my blog posting with no success. Then I clicked on the 'Blog This' tab in Flickr and inserted the details of my URL here. This seemed to work, so like many times before I just followed the prompts and success, or at least I thought. While my photo was now on my blog it did not allow me to add text as well. Delete!

Finally I saved the edited photo to my desktop and while in Blogger just clicked on the 'Add Photo' tab in my post. Now here we are, constructivist theories hold true and through my own experiences I now know how to add a photo to my blog. I'm sure that there is an easier way to do this but for now, I have achieved the result I wanted.

I realise that as a 'Digital Immigrant' my future students will all be 'Digital Natives' and in order to teach them effectively I need to familiarise myself and become proficient with these types of online tools. Mark Prensky (2005) believes that if we cannot engage our students in education then we will enrage them. This means engaging with them on their level and while programs like Flickr and Piknic can offer great visual stimulation (that is free to use) it is important to note that engagement is not just about fancy graphics but about good ideas and how we use them (Prensky, 2005).

Reference:
Prensky, M. (2005). Engage me or enrage me: What today's learners demand. Retrieved August 8, 2009, from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0553.pdf