The Flickr lesson I found is for ages 8 – 15 and is called Five Card Flickr Story (Interface, 2009). This lesson would be good for literature (story-telling), writing, spelling, grammar, communication, sequencing, evaluation and critical thinking exercises.
How does this work: Go to http://web.nmc.org/5cardstory/. The site “deals” five random photos from Flickr. You choose one. The site deals another five and you choose again. This is repeated five times, so you end up with a final set of five images.
Before starting the activity, you would discuss with students the possibilities of pictures telling a story: how to interpret a picture, how action can be determined and, the story behind the image. Show several images, one at a time, and ask them to define the story behind each; then, ask them to link the stories behind each picture.
During the discussion, tell them they are going to be doing a writing exercise where they examine five photos and write a story that links the five photos.
You can both prepare five images per student and perhaps display them on the white board for choice selection ahead of time; or, you can have the students select the five photos per student with you directly from Flickr while projecting on the white board. You may select the same five images for the whole class, if the timing is more advantageous or the activity results more to your preference.
Once the five images are selected, you can discuss what can be written about them and provide parameters for the activity. For example: you could have students write the story based on them; or, about something happing at the school; or, let them come up with their own ideas.
You could also ask them to write about the images in a particular order; or, swap the order around. For a little more complication and provocation of critical thinking skills, you could even allow them to “trade” one card to another student. This would force them to think ahead on their story line to make certain they are trading for something more relevant to their story and not inadvertently detracting from their story.
Once the stories are done, discuss them and compare the results. Talk about how people interpret messages and whether they are the same or different. Discuss the “whys” of communication. At this point, you may even ask the students if they would like to publish their stories on the web, through YouTube or Facebook or some other web 2.0 medium.
Follow-up exercises: (1) use sets of five images as chapters and combine them to create longer stories; (2) select from alternative sources for images such as magazines, class albums, or have the class take digital photos of their own.
(2009). Lesson Plan 42: Five Card Flickr Story. Interface Magazine Online, 19(4). Retrieved February 12, 2009, from http://interfacemagazine.co.nz/downloads/INTERFACE% 20Lesson %20Plan%2042%20-%20Five%20Card %20Flickr% 20Story.pdf
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Flickr Lesson Plan for Marketing: My idea for using Flickr for class would be to use the same Five Card Flickr activity, but adapt it to my Introduction to Marketing class.
Marketing is all about the message and human interpretation of words, colors, symbols, shapes, etc. Marketing messages provoke human action or interaction and therefore, the marketing images must cause intuitive action or re-action in response to the visual interpretations. For this reason, this is a great exercise and I am so glad to have been forced to seek it out!
Since marketing students are involved with and required to understand and do storyboarding for message development, this is the perfect opportunity to take students through deconstructing messages.
My adaption of the exercise would follow:
1) When we reach the lectures on messages, encoding and decoding, and the process of communication, I would explain the Five Card Flickr functionality of the web site.
2) We would select the five images per student group together, while projecting onto the white board.
3) We would discuss the process of determining the who, what, where, when, how and why (marketing objectives) of what their message is to convey.
4) We would discuss how to determine the product(s) their message will market.
5) We would walk through the process of deconstructing each image in order to identify the encoding/decoding that is occurring through the images.
6) Students would then choose a visual media to convey their message. They could chose from: iMovie, Garageband, Screenflow, PowerPoint, Keynote, live video, etc. The original images would have to be present in the story production.
7) Students would be given two hours of class time to work on the project together and then assigned to complete their group work as homework. The presentation would be due for an upcoming class period.
This activity would not only force the students to deconstruct images as messages; understand the process of human encoding and decoding; but, also, how to take those original images (stories) and re-create them into a new story or message. This is the process of marketing.
All images courtesy of http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=free+images &gbv=2&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10
Ginger, I really like the adaptation from the Five Card exercise to your own plans. I also teach a marketing class and my initial ideas were to leverage Flickr for students to submit content they find their daily lives, but after reading your lesson, I think it would be wise to pre-qualify the assignment with an experience that is a little more framed like yours. Something tells me we should chat further about marketing materials and classroom ideas. Thanks for the insight.
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