Photo Sharing in Education

1 What is Photo Sharing?
2 Ideas Around Photo Sharing
3 How It Works
4 Guides To Photo Sharing Tools

[edit] What is Photo Sharing?

Photo sharing tools work as a combination of things. They serve as online storage spaces for photos, with the ability to tag and organize each photo, as well as publishing your images to whomever you want. Other users who review images in these photo sharing web sites have the opportunity to leave comments for the photographer on any image that has been made available. Some photo sharing web sites offer the ability to edit your photos online, make notes, post your photos to a blog and a variety of other features.

Perhaps the best known photo sharing web site is Flickr. Flicker uses an advertising supported model so that users can publish their images for free. Other services like Shutterfly depend on users to purchase photos online. While paid services like http://www.smugmug.com/ SmugMug use subscription fees rather than advertisements and photo purchases to support their web site. Some software, likePicasa, uses a peer-2-peer network to share photos directly from your own computer.

[edit] Ideas Around Photo Sharing

share, comment, and add notes to photos or images to be used in the classroom
embed your photos into your school or class web space
inspire writing and creativity
create a storybook using shared images
create a presentation using the photos, annotation and slideshow in flckr (Examples: What Can We Do With Flickr?, Networked Learning and Beyond the Blog)
use tools in Flickr Toys to create motivational posters, magazine covers, cd covers, and more, using shared photos
find photos that you can use that are creative commons licensed (see http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ and http://flickrlilli.org.uk/ )
use tags to find photos of areas and events around the world for use in the classroom.
use photos to enhance students classroom work or for media literacy projects
promote and document school events in order to share photos with the school community
combine geotagged photos with Google Earth for enhanced geography explorations.
create digital portfolios where students and instructors can comment on the photos that are included.
create a photoblog using the shared photos

Share Photos of class and school events using Flickr. This service allows you to embed photos in a blog, web site and share them via RSS. It’s a great way to give parents a peek into their children’s school day.

You can also grab feeds from interesting local photographers and bring them into the classroom for discussion, or for writing inspiration. My current favourite feed is photographer Sam Javanrouh.

[edit] How It Works

Each photo sharing service is different, but they all offer upload forms with the ability to browse to images on your own computer, in order to select the images that you would like to share. They all post images to a web site on the internet; except for Picasa which shares images over the internet and uses your own computer to host them.