Saturday 29 November 2008

Create a Flickr Montage

I just spotted Flickrin which is a really nice site that exploits flickr images and helps you to create a photo montage, like the ones below, that can be embedded into a blog or web page.

It's very easy to use, just type in a username or tag keyword, decide how many rows of images you would like and then click on 'generate'.
It's then just a simple matter of copying the code and pasting it into your blog or website html.

All the images that appear in the montage are hyperlinked to the original image on flickr, and you can select anything from 1 to 10 rows of images.

This is a really handy tool for teaching and you could use it in a number of ways, like getting students to create their own picture dictionaries (The strong visual images should help them to remember words)

You could also create a montage and get the students to guess the word used. There's an activity here designed around a similar idea: Guess the Word

It might also be a useful tool for exploring the lexical fields or particular words and see how they can be used to describe different things. For example I created this montage by typing in the word 'fire'. This demonstrates some the various ways the word can be used.

Range of lexical use. The tag word here was 'fire'.

What I haven't discovered yet, is whether the montage is regenerated each time the page is opened. It's likely that it is, and this could mean that the montage changes as other flickr users add images with the same tag word. You can also get some interesting images by using more than one tag word. This seems to pull in images that carry both words as tags.

I spotted this tool along with some other interesting stuff on the Life is a Feast blog which belongs to Ana Maria, a teacher from Brazil.

Hope you enjoy Flickrin and find some good uses for it.

Related links:
Best

Nik Peachey

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Reading your post about flickrin gave me an idea for my class blog. The fifth grade science class has been working on landforms, so I searched for that on flickrin and got a montage for our blog. They are going to try to identify which landforms they see and discuss the pictures next week.

Thanks for inspiring a brain storm! I would be honored if you would take a look and see what you think! =)

Nik Peachey said...

Hey Ana,

That's great! It looks like your keyword has got you a nice variation of landforms too. I also love your task forstudents and the idea of getting them to ask 'I wonder' questions.

Hope they enjoy it.

Best
Nik