Applications using Flickr

After experimenting with flickr for a while, I accessed the bookr application. This is a great tool that can use your images (or others) to create a virtual picture book. I looked at picture books already made by others from the archives. A Little Alphabet Book by GP (which cannot be seen through this blog) is a virtual picture looking at all the letters of the alphabet in the environment. This gave me many ideas for the ESOL classroom. First of all, creating personalized picture books is a great source of writing motivation. ESL students could first learn the content from the teacher (the alphabet), take pictures from their environment that could illustrate that letter (grapheme or phoneme), then go to bookr and create their own picture book. Little syntactic structure is needed, making such an activity great for beginning ESL students. This could also be extended into creating personalized dictionaries for students. They could either find or take pictures that represent a certain vocabulary word, upload them on flickr, then create their own personalized vocabulary dictionaries. This makes learning vocabulary authentic and motivating for the students.