Five Card Flickr

Here's another nice idea for using the internet as an inspiration for creative writing; Five Card Flickr.

Five Card Flickr draws from nearly a thousand photos on flickr tagged with "5cardflickr"

You are dealt 5 random photos from Flickr and you choose one to add to your story. You then repeat this 4 more times until you have 5 photos that you can then use to tell a story.

You can then write your story on the blog itself, or you could display them on the IWB for students to write their own stories individually.

If you have photos on Flickr that you'd like to add to the pool of images used, then just tag them with 5cardflickr.

The 5 Card Flickr idea is based on a game called 5 Card Nancy where you create a 5 frame story using old comic strips. Here's an online version of that game which you might also like to use. Or if you're looking for a non-ict activity and have a stack of old comics or magazines, then here are the rules on playing it for yourself.

A related, but slightly different way of doing things, is the "Tell a story in 5 frames" group in Flickr. Take 5 photographs to tell a story. Again this could be a nice activity to do with students and some digital cameras.

If you are looking for new ways to use technology to tell stories, then here are 50+ Ways to tell a story, collated by CogDogRoo.

Tilt Shift Maker

Tilt shifting is a way of processing a photograph so that it appears to be a model instead of the real thing.

I've always been amazed by the fact that just adding a blur to parts of the photograph changes the whole way the brain processes the image and makes you think you are looking at a model.

Previously, if you've wanted to make a tilt-shift image, you had to play around with blurs and masks or filters in Photoshop. But now there's a website that lets you produce them almost instantly.



Tilt Shift Maker lets you upload an image, or choose one from the internet. You can process images directly from Flickr if you give it the URL of the image. The image above is my attempt at a Tilt Shifted BETT.

The whole process is very quick. You can preview your image before you produce the final version, and then save it to your computer. There's even a Flickr group of images produced by the website which you can add your finished image to if you wish.

Try it out now; http://tiltshiftmaker.com

Creative Commons Images and Sounds

In the last blog post I mentioned how to use FlickrCC to search for creative commons images to use in your presentations. There are some other search tools out there too.

I've just uploaded to Scribd a document I produced for the blogging/podcasting course about ways of finding creative commons images and sounds/music. I'll embed it below.

Creative Commons Images and Sounds

Get your own at Scribd or explore others: Education Course Material blogs creative

Flickr and Twitter Guides

I've been playing with lots of online tools recently, but the two that are my current favourites are Twitter and Flickr. I want to use this blog post to promote two great guides that fellow educators have put together for these tools.

I've been on Flickr for ages and it's a great way of sharing your photographs, and also finding great images from others.

Susie Vesper has put together an excellent guide to the main features of Flickr and how you can make good use of it in education. There's lots of ideas there to inspire you. You can read her guide here.

If you do get into Flickr, send me a Flickrmail. My flickr screen name is dannynic

Another tool I've been making use of in recent weeks is Twitter. Essentially Twitter is a micro-blogging tool, but it has become a thriving community of educators and web2.0 fans who are all sharing and swapping ideas with each other. I have lost track of the number of excellent websites I have found about because someone on Twitter posted that they'd been using it. It can be hard to keep up with all the chat, but it's something I dip in and out of when I get the time.

Twitter's been struggling a little recently as more and more people use it, but hopefully it will sort these load issues out soon.

If you would like to find out more, then Tom Barrett has written an excellent guide on using Twitter as a teaching and learning tool. It's a pretty comprehensive guide and well worth a visit. You can read it here.

If you do get into Twitter, get in touch. My twitter name is Dannynic. (like most of my screen names!)

Animoto

Thanks to Ewan at EduBlogs for linking to a great little resource called AniMoto. It creates professional-looking video slideshows from your photos. I am too tight to stump up for the full version yet, but I have been playing with the free version that lets you make short 15 second clips.

Here's my first video. It's taken some of my photos from my Flickr stream showing my ski holiday last year. It took about 5 mins to set up and about 5 mins for the whole thing to render. I like the finished result though.

It then gives you the code to embed it in your blog. I'm hoping this works and that below you can see the video.