Flickr (Thing 4)

I thought that the Common Craft video about photosharing the 23 Things blog linked to was quite well done. Other 23 Things blogs I'd read noted the Blogging video from the same person so I watched that one, too. They were both great explanations of the two 2.0 tools. (Note: I did not put the video into this Blog entry because I didn't want the page to take forever to load for folks.)

Because of my goofy Internet access I ended up doing this thing in several parts. (Watching the videos at school because of Internet speed, but looking at Flickr at home because it is blocked at school and I ran out of time.)

I think Flickr has its fun. I have friends that use it. While we do not use it for our photosharing as a family (we use Picasa Web Albums via our Google accounts), I thought it was interesting to note that when I searched for "Middle School Libraries" there were only 721 results. Is that because we aren't using it, haven't figured out how to use it or because it is blocked in our schools? Similarly, "middle schools Minnesota" only yielded 180 results! Not that popular for MS usage, I guess. Public libraries are using this a lot and there were some cool images out there from programs past.

I could see this being fun to show book titles or fun things like that. But the posting of student pics on the web gets complicated with the photo policies etc. I was going to take some photos of my super busy library. I think it'd be cool to show that we are a busy busy place, and hey, my mom wants to see what I do, but I don't have the time to go look to make sure each student has the photo policy "OK." That's reasonable right? I mean, when my desk is stacks deep, we have a new circulation system to learn the idosyncracies of, I need to pull books for booktalks and also keep my student teacher working and learning, I just don't feel that that's a good use of my time. Or am I mistaken? If so, someone tell me. And maybe that's why others aren't using it in MS, too?

Then, I thought, "Well, you could take a picture of all the Jane Austen stuff you have and people would think it's cute." But here's the rub, I check most of it out from the library and don't own most of it....

And then I remembered Peeps in the library. Unfortunately, there are no photos from this fabulous little website on Flickr.

Instead I decided to find a picture that demonstrated what I have spent the last two days in my library working on. Weeding the reference collection! While I did not take any photos during this project, with the help of my student teacher, we removed numerous titles from our collection. (No pictures taken because there just wasn't the time and I'm not that clever to think of taking a picture to in the midst of a project like that!) But here is the image that Jenica26 took when she weeded her library and posted to Flickr. Thank you, Jenica26! (Her image is used with Creative Commons license.)