New Literacy

I'm finding that Flickr could have issues being used in a classroom. Depending on what you search for, there can be inappropriate pictures come up. Even innocent searches could be ruined by people putting bad pictures up and giving them innocent, unrelated search tags. Even on the homepage before you search, there are pictures up that can be questionable. I would be afraid that students would click on these pictures and just mess around instead of doing their work, and see things that we as teachers could hear about later from parents or the kids themselves. I don't want to give my students a project that could make anyone uncomfortable or at risk of seeing something they shouldn't. However, this could be used as an opportunity to discuss appropriate internet use and tell kids to be aware of what they are searching and looking at. Hopefully the school's network would be able to filter this inappropriate content out, but if the students worked on their projects at home, there may not be the same kind of content filter and they could see inappropriate things. I think this could be a really amazing technology if it were strictly photography of aspects of other cultures, even including everyday things like pictures of classrooms in other countries. But unfortunately anyone can post pretty much any photo on this website.