bp7_2009101_flickr

Integrating flickr into lesson plans

Please find the link to a lesson plan using flickr.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19387797/Lesson-Plan-With-Flickr

In this lesson plan the teacher used flickr to teach students to learn new words specifically verbs and their conjugation and relate them to pictures of people using the verb in question. This is a novel approach to teaching grammar, as it is not compartmentalized in grammar class. The lesson plan using flickr allows students to relate grammar to everyday activities.

Other ideas for using flickr in the classroom

Another opportunity to integrate flickr into lesson plans is at Universities and societies such as the American Association of Petroleum Geoscientist (AAPG )for field courses in geosciences. Fieldwork is an essential part of becoming a geologist but it is difficult for schools to integrate sufficient field trips into the curriculum. With flickr students could post pictures of geological formations with the precise location. The type of structure, the formation process and age will be the tags and organization of the pictures within this group. Students and professors will then discuss these pictures within flicr. These pictures and the discussions can help students learn to build persuasive arguments about the structures formation using geological fact, get alternative views about formation process for the geological pictures and also encourage students in their spare to time to visit these site themselves.

flickr for the oil and gas industry training

The integrating flickr into a personal learning environments and lesson plans at my job, will be difficult. I work for an oil and gas service company, where we provide training for our clients (operators such as bp, Exxon Mobil) on our products. The oil and gas industry is not what one will call an open industry, although there may be collaboration amongst companies the sharing of data is not an option. Why because our clients the operators spend millions and sometimes billion of dollars on data about the subsurface. Since the data is proprietary and exorbitantly expensive the sharing even the location of data is forbidden.

The only instance where I think the integration of flickr into a personal environment may be possible is if we create a class for a specific client. Then it would be okay to share pictures of the data and interpretation performed using our software. Flickr will facilitate students discussing the progress and choices of their classmates.

However I can foresee problems with even this approach. Flickr will be storing proprietary client information. The client will have no control over their data and will be relying on flickr to maintain the privacy and access rights. Flickr is a cloud-based service like gmail and there is no service level agreement with flickr, so outages and data leaks will have no redress options. The only solution will be to allow companies to create their own proprietary version of flickr so that their pictures are stored behind a firewall. In the end I will have to conclude that flickr in its present form is not usable at my job.