Text and visuals

In my previous ASSURE lesson plan I created a lesson plan to help sixth graders write a 3 page persuasive paper on a topic of their choice. This was also to be accompanied by a poster or presentation. In order to help students come up with ideas for this it seemed best to use an app that could act as a visual aid. I chose to use the program Flickr to help students in presenting visuals with their projects.

Flickr is a photo sharing app. It would allow students to share, organize, and collaborate on photos in a way that would help their final presentation. Students can create blogs or albums or even share videos. This could come in handy if they do something interesting and want to share with others about how it was done. If students may be having trouble they can also browse Flickr and find photos that they can use in their presentations.

This site has potential to help greatly with the NET-S standards. By sharing photos and helping other students they are collaborating and helping each other in a constructive way. Flickr is also open to experts or professionals. Being able to interact with them may help give them great ideas in how to employ digital media in their presentation. They would also be using digital tools to gather information. By gathering photos for this presentation they could plan strategies on where to go to find what they need, organize their photos, and even evaluate and see what would work for their specific presentation.

They wouldn’t have to do a lot of work prior to using Flickr as the site seems fairly easy to use. The students should have some basic knowledge of computers but that is about all they’ll need to be able to insert files and type descriptions. They may want to know what makes a good photo and bad photo to help in choosing what they need for their project.

Flickr is easy to use and easy to navigate which may be its biggest strength. Its also and app that has little trouble in keeping attention because of the endless amount of photos on almost anything you can imagine. That same endless amount of photos can also be extremely helpful in coming up with ideas.

While the endless photos can be a source of ideas it can also be a source of distraction. This becomes the one major limitation in using the app.

It is easy enough to use that Flickr could be picked up at an early age which would definitely help in the use of digital technology into their high school years. But right around sixth grade seems like it would be a perfect age to pick up the ability to use an app like this.