When a picture painted a thousand words, the world opened....

Reflections on the Process of Learning about Photo Sharing

Early man painted the hunt on cave walls, history was shared with oral tradition. Our lives were defined by our stories, and if we could talk, we could share. The printing press changed literacy. If we could read, and further write, we could share. The art of the story teller drifted into the realm of artists and thespian; the written word then afforded us more precision in expression. The written word could be shared through books and magazines and tracts; the written word gave exactness and accuracy and hence overshadowed the power of the spoken word or the image of the picture. For centuries, the picture was of minor use in developing a story, particularly on the personal level. The invention of the camera certainly changed some of that. We began to catalog our own stories in albums and in boxes, but it has only been in the past decade that the picture has emerged again as a truly viable form of personal storytelling, thanks to the new ability to share our stories in picture form.

Sharing of photos felt to me like an archive, which is exactly what it is. At last, the world can see the historical and important pictures that define world history through the commons on flickr. At last we have a chance to store images that are our past, to be able to pass the story down through generations without fear of paper decomposition or loss in the mundane events of everyday life. At last we can classify and retrieve in ways we had never thought of previously. This was never an issue for my parents, who were always limited in their photo taking by the cost of development. Our stacks of photos and slides seemed ominous upon their deaths in the early 90’s, but is a tiny anthill compared to the images we now save with digital imagery on our computer hard drives. Sorting this monstrous archive will be a challenge to my survivors if I do not does some work now. Flickr provides an incredible opportunity to store our images off of our hard drives for safekeeping. This I knew before my exploration of the Web 2.0 tool; what I didn’t understand was its ability to categorize, sort, tag and retrieve in a way that builds access and builds community and educational opportunity. Web 2.0 for Schools awakened in me a interest, but it was Richardson iin Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts that provided a stronger practical foundation to take the photo plunge. As usual, the Common Craft Video was a perfect tool to highlight the ease and simplicity of the process. On a purely personal level, I have struggled with organizing prints. I have discarded albums, I have labeled the backs, I have put them in sequential photo boxes, and then the camera went digital. I have stored them in files with dates, with topics and with labels I can no longer understand. I can’t find anything. Despite the photo mess in my life, and the fact that I long ago had a Webshots account, I never connected the Photo Sharing capabilities with my own needs. Uploading a dozen pictures to Flickr this week gave me an insight into how I can now sort, categorize, manage and retrieve pictures. I learn from the reading, however it is the act of creating a Flickr presense that was the most effective teaching tool for me.

Discussion of Photo Sharing in Terms of My Own Personal Learning

I will be able to find my trip to San Francisco from this past summer and compare to summer 1981. I will be able to find collections of pictures of my first born and sort by year. My children will be able access this same group of pictures, be part of an ‘affinity group’ (Davies, Marchant, 2009) and will be able to make comments on them and make reflections on their memories, attach them to the pictures and share these across our family space. This, given the diverse geographical space we occupy across the country, is reason enough to embrace this technology with abandon. We can, with geotags, see our world in ways that were never before possible. In 2009, flickr was a word to me. It was a web site I had never explored. It was another of those things I wanted to do in my future.

The seamlessness of the transfer of a Yahoo product (flickr) to a Google product (Blogger) was very surprising; the portability of information and the breadth and potential of one’s online identity boggles my mind. I can clearly see that there will be infinite ways I will have to continue to learn about pictures and communication and connections with my world community.

Discussion of the Tool in Terms of Teaching and Learning

Twenty eight students, reading levels between grade two and grade eleven. Writing levels between grade one and grade eight. This is a typical Alberta grade six classroom. Three students are coded with special needs, several are ELL (English Language Learners). All of them have lives and stories to tell with such a diversity of skills that would challenge any teacher. There are writing disabilities I know have never been diagnosed. There are children who have physical challenges holding and managing a pencil. All of them have stories and lives to share; many are frustrated with their inabilities to express themselves. How do we tell our stories? How can I look at Marie who has level 2 English but appears brilliant and dedicated to learning, to Avery who talks a blue streak but can’t spell or write a complete sentence, to Katie, who has her hand up all the time but can’t seem to get the words out? Stories began with images and words.

Welcome to the world of Web 2.0. Techniques, skills, tools, abound and can help the learners at all their levels become storytellers. Those who struggle with concrete written structures can use an abundance of pictures to tell their story. Those who can write can enhance and have choices in presentation. Those who are researchers and historians can find primary sources in images to support their thesis. The world has changed and it can and will have a huge impact on those 28 grade 6 children if we can make this world theirs. I was in grade 6 forty six years ago. My world was closed: my classmates, my family, the few streets I travelled on my bicycle, the skating rink on the next street. Television was limited; the world was a safe haven.My 28 grade 6 students are in a world so different from mine that, if I had moved instantaneously from one place to the next, culture shock would have been severe. Jessica is on Facebook every night and sending messages to over 300 friends. She shares pictures and videos, not all of which are appropriate, hourly if not more frequently. Everyone knows her favourite song, her favorite band, her most recent crush. Those who have never her met her in person will know her at the mall… her profile picture changes as regularly as her preference in boys, probably more so. Her web cam records pictures and her iPhone keeps her up-to-date no matter where she is. Selena, on the other hand, has a limited number of social networking friends. Her parents monitor everything she does. She posts pictures and makes some comments. Joshua has no access to a computer. His parent’s camera uses film and he has not got his own computer. He can’t post his Facebook profile at school with an image so he has no online identity. When asked, he shrugs. “That’s for geeks and nerds, I don’t care.” Sadly, Joshua is also one those students who struggles to write and express a story. He is discouraged when the class has access to the computer lab and he has not got the computer literacy skills to flow freely through the assignments. Can’t sign in on some of the sites because he has no email address, and his school does not provide them. He finds it a bit awkward to navigate the web because he has no opportunity to develop these skills. He certainly has no picture of himself to post!

Our world of students is so very diverse in terms of their technical savvy and it is a challenge for me as an educators to meet an increasingly broad gap in skills and competencies. My own competencies are struggling to keep up with the opportunities for education on the web. As a Teacher-Librarians, I have a mandate to provide tools for learning but the world is changing faster than we are and some students like Jessica have technical skills, some students like Joshua are handicapped by their environments, and most are pretty much figuring things out piece meal as we are.

With the advent of EDES 501, I knew I had to take advantage of these new technologies, and designed a cooperative teaching project with a grade 4/5 combined class that explored regions (Alberta and Canada) through photo websites. The students used flickr and other tools that tagged to flickr (GalaxyTag) to find appropriate photographs of their region to reflect the online and print research they had done in the first weeks of January. Using the photo production tool of Photo Story 3, the students put together their stories of regions. Tag Galaxy was my first real opportunity to comprehend the power of Tags, and it was only though the research for this course that I saw the connection and the development that this facility enables. Children were empowered to tell stories using pictures as a powerful story telling device based on extensive research. Not only did they engage in research in an unprecedented way, the compilation of pictures and comments were made using higher level thinking skills and critical observation with an engagement in learning that regions projects had not shown previously. Still, I was not cognizant of the power of the tags within flickr. Because of the video savvy of our young people, (here I am referring to the use of moving images such as on television and Web) and the still - visual savvy of the previous generation (here I am referring to the strategies of looking at the written word and looking at pictures provided through text and other non fluid materials) we as educators need to rethink our own history and roles as literacy educators. Just like the printing press changed literacy, so does the web change literacy not just around written words but around the published image? Perhaps, given technology, we are finally able to move back toward literacies that do not just rely on reading print material. As a professional in a school library, this brings forth incredible challenges. Do our collection acquisition practices reflect the need to teach new literacies? Does our teaching of new literacies reflect the need for digital storytelling and photo sharing of knowledge? Does our technology in our schools even begin to keep up with our need to stay current in our world? How do we convince an increasingly financially stringent system that literacy is a developing and evolutionary process that needs to be supported, first and foremost, by our school system in light of an increasingly divergent level of access at home? Given the stratification of society with technology, are we not increasingly responsible to level the playing field?

“The bottom line is that all these advances in media technologies are making it even easier for young people to spend more and more time with media. It’s more important than ever that researchers, policymakers and parents stay on top of the impact it’s having on their lives” (http://weblogg-ed.com/2010/no-choice/ Richardson)

In developing a project based on photo images, it was inherent on myself and the classroom teacher to provide a format that best met the needs of our project and students. Skills involved in any of the platforms were similar. We compared Photo Story 3, (a free downloadable software that is hosted on your computer), Animoto (a web based application that would be accessible from home and school but required logins for the students) and Windows Media Player, hosted on the school computers. We chose Photo Story 3 as it easily accessed shared photos (flickr) and did not require email addresses, but allowed an ability to create a digital story easily shared among students and a genuine learning experience that focused on skills and content.

I am still a neophyte when it comes to using digital photos online, and sites such as flickr and Webshots. Doors have creaked open. I am struggling to embed comments and geotags and will continue to work on that. I can see opportunities to differentiate learning, to present materials in diverse and interesting ways, to find images and ideas beyond the range of my classroom and school and thereby open an entire new world to my students. I can visualize a world where students are equalized in many ways by their access to photos and to the web. When we overcome the challenges of hardware in classrooms and schools, we will create an equal playing field for students. All of our Maries, our Averys and our Katies will find opportunity to express themselves in ways we have never dreamed possible. Our minds, as educators, will be opened to the minds of these students who have been for too long limited by the power of the written word when the accessible picture was their entrance to their world.