Thing 8

Thing 8, a photo by marianne1022 on Flickr.

This is my Ella Payton, a photo by marianne1022 on Flickr.

Okay, So I just played around for about 2 hours on the whole mashups and I still dont know what to think. I tried to play around with all the discovery tools. The one that was the easiest was creating a puzzle from a photo on flickr. That probably only took me a few minutes to figure out. I just chose a random picture on my desktop. I think the puzzle is a cute concept. I think that art teachers could have a lot of fun with this tool. I also chose to do a mosaic. This was also fairly easy and was fun to do. What really baffled my mind was how flickr was connected with so many other tools. For example, I could chose photos from facebook to make my mosaic with. I also liked doing the spelling projects that flickr had. I think that kids could have a lot of fun with this and many different lessons could be incorporated with this tool. I understand that one of the objectives for the 23 things is to explore technology and use it to help facilitate learning in the classroom. However, I am just not sure if I would really use this much other than for creating picture mosaics of the class. Maybe the poster thing would be fun and practical. The kids could upload a picture of themselves and write a caption. This would be fun and creative. However, I am not sure this would be a good idea because the kids would probably want to print out the posters and it would not be economical for all the kids to print a poster of themselves. Maybe as I get more familiar with these features I will be able to find ways to make these tools valuable for the classroom. However, at this point I only see myself doing the picture mosaics. (By the way, I did try to do the clock mashup, but my computer would not allow me to do so...I am not sure why not...I hope someone is able to so this one and posts it because I would like to see it.)