Joyce Valenza’s Neverending Search

Forgive me for sharing yet another half-baked idea. After reading about how my buddy Darren was using Flickr to have students reflect on math concepts, I began thinking about how to use it to ask students to reflect on language knowledge, more specifically to play with words in new ways and make those new words sticky. I love the idea of associating words with images, of personalizing use of the words, of vocabulary slideshows around which we could create narrative. I love the idea of forcing comments that make learners play with the word we are illustrating. I also think this is going to be very cool for ELL and world language learnings.

I starting brainstorming with some English teachers. On Friday Andrew and I began our Flickr Vocabulary Project. I am not yet linking to it, because this one is still in beta. (More intrepid readers will likely find it themselves.)

Friday was one of those days we felt like we were building the plane while it was flying. The students took to the project well. We assigned them words in the unit to illustrate. Some chose to create original drawings. Some took photos and brought them into Flickr Toys or other generators for enhancements. Some had fun enhancing and explaining images with notes.

When B Block ended we took a good look at what we had. We had all the images. The students got the technology. But we were disappointed with the way some of the students used some of the words. It was clear that they didn’t fully get that part. It is much clearer in this project than it is when students simply memorize those definitions and write those sentences.

Then I think we got it. The big learning comes next time when we look at the images together and discuss context. How are these words really used? How can we refine the sentences and notes to reflect more nuanced meanings and usage? How can we further use Flickr comments to continue to refine the learning.

Can we share this learning with other classes?

I’ll keep you posted. Below is one of our models.