In the latest addition to the Technology in Modern Foreign Languages series, Alice Ayel shares how she uses the internet and the rich photographic resources it contains to bring authentic materials into her classroom and focus her students’ work.

MFL teachers have always used images to teach their students new items of vocabulary. However, it can be very time consuming when planning a lesson to find the right picture matching the word we want to teach. Nowadays, the internet is there to help us save time:

Flickr

I was introduced to Flickr in January 2009 by attending a free online course on exploring images in the 21st Century Classroom organized by EVO. Flickr is a website where you can store, sort, search and share your photos online. It is free to up to 2 videos and 100MB worth of photos each calendar month. You can edit your photos and make them look nicer, add comments and captions using Picnik. You can also search pictures taken by other members of Flickr by entering keywords.

In addition, you can join different groups where people share similar interests. I joined two groups: Images4Education and Great Quotes about Learning and Change and then it occurred to me to create a group for language teachers called Images to Teach Languages to share or use photos or videos to teach either a word, a conversation or a grammar point.

Instead of looking in the entire web, all the pictures are in one one place tagged ( i.e. catalogued using key words) according to topics – animals, places in town, shops, etc. Teachers can then copy and paste the pictures into their presentations, or download them, print them or use them as flashcards.

Already 52 members have joined this group and you can find pictures from different countries such as shops in France, Spain or Germany so that pupils can actually see what shops are like in different countries. To make the search even easier and quicker, teachers looking for a specific topic can add a post in Discussion with what they are looking for and other group members will help them in their search.

Big Huge Labs

Big Huge Labs is a free website where you can create posters, puzzles, albums, covers, games and more using photos from your computer or photos from your Flickr or Facebook account. For example, the aim of a Year 8 French lesson was to introduce different food from different countries and to create a nice menu which would include the words students had learnt during the lesson. First I looked for pictures of different types of restaurants and then of different types of food and I favourited them on my Flickr account. Then I created two mosaics with the two sets of photos using Mosaic Maker on Big Huge Labs. In less than 15 minutes, I ended up with on one hand 8 photos of 8 different restaurants and on the other hand a set of 16 different types of food.

My students were teamed up into groups of 3 or 4 and were tasked with looking at the mosaics  in order to decide the type of restaurant (French, Chinese, Mexican ….) and then the nationality of each type of food and whther it was a starter, main course or dessert. In teams, they then created their own menus. The photos were “real”, they were not clip-arts and this helped to engage the students in useful discussions about the topic at hand.

PHRASR

PHRASR is an interactive web-based application that uses Flickr images to illustrate the phrases that users submit. It is part of
Pimpampum, a website with other applications which make the most of Flickr. PHRASR allows you to create a slideshow from words or sentences, although, unfortunately, currently only in English.

You type a word or a sentence in a box, PHRASR browses through the pictures on Flickr and finds a set of pictures matching the word or sentence you typed. You then just choose the best picture. I still managed to make relevant use of this fantastic web tool when I introduced European countries to my year 8 class. I entered the names of European countries in English: Austria, Germany, Ireland…. and I had a slideshow with amazing pictures from Flickr made in a matter of minutes. I showed the slideshow to my class and asked them to translate the countries into French.

It was the starting point of a discussion about each country: where it was on the map, what the official language was, what you could visit and since we had learnt previously about food, we also talked about the food specialities in each country. Students had a grid to fill in and then had to create a ID card about a country of their choice.

Since I couldn’t pause the slideshow to focus on each picture, I favourited each picture on my Flickr account so we could have a closer look at them. Students were engaged, they especially liked talking about the countries they visited like Spain or where they had family like Ireland. It helped me show the rest of Europe to my students in a different, perhaps more positive light.

BOOKR

BOOKR is another web-based application from Pimpampum and it allows you to create photo books using Flickr images. It is very straightforward to use because students don’t have to sign in or register, so they can start straight away. There are no fancy designs, backgrounds, sounds, you just add pictures and captions. Some might argue it could become boring but I found students didn’t get too distracted by those effects and could really focus on the task, which was to create a photo book in another language.

In order to find and add pictures, students enter keywords or tags in the tag box at the bottom of the screen, they can then choose a picture from Flickr. Finally, when students finished their photo books, they published it by sending me an email. I then got a link in my mailbox to their photo books and I could either copy and paste the code to the school website, for example, or save their url links. I used this fantastic tool with a mixed ability group in year 9 and obtained fantastic results.

They had to create a photo book about their last holidays. First, I showed them a photo book I created and explained to them how it worked. Then, students went into the ICT room and created their photo books. At the end of the lesson, I asked them to send their work to my email address. At the end of the day, my mailbox was full of BOOKR messages!

I then embedded the best photo books on the school blog. Students were on task throughout the lesson very busy creating their photo album and at the end they were very pleased with themselves because they had some ICT work to view and show off. All of these tools were big time savers for me and helped me delivered successful lessons where students were engaged.

Of course, I came across all those fantastic tools thanks to my Personal Learning Network thanks to whom I have become a better teacher as well as learner!

Alice Ayel

This post is tagged edtech, flickr, images, mfltech, photos