My Bucket of Photos

Reflections on Learning
Spent the last week or so exploring photosharing websites. I eventually chose to use Photobucket. No particular reason why, although it did seem easy to use and easy to sync with my Blogger website. To be honest, I’ve never given photosharing much thought. My wife is the camera person and whenever I think to take pictures it's generally too late. The Wikipedia info was interesting, but a bit superficial and clearly the guy in the trailfire video is trying to sell the notion of photosharing and makes it sound so EASY and so FUN. The text provided more insight into the social aspect of photosharing, but I think the most interesting learning here occured through experimenting with the tools. That's probably the way it was meant to be.

The Personal Level
At this level, I can see many applications. My brother and sister-in-law have been doing this for years as they have traveled and lived in many places and it has always been a really good way for us as a family to keep track of them and stay in touch with them. With the evolution of Facebook, my wife has certainly shared more photos than ever before and it is something we should use more often. My preference, I suppose, would be to use these services in a secure way, making certain that I can limit who can see my photos (or better yet, albums) and in particular pictures of my family.

The Professional Level
One of the things I would like to see us do more at school is share what is going on in a more timely manner. We’ve moved to mostly (95%) delivering our newsletter electronically and I envision that our website (www.riverheightsschool.ca) will eventually serve as a real-time newsletter for us. At the school level we already collect photos from teachers for a year-end slideshow, and one of the things I’d like to do at school is stream some of these photos onto a monitor in our main entrance as a way of sharing what is happening at our school. Doing this through a photosharing site would seem to be a natural extension of this and something I might experiment with over the next few months. The concern here is time management. These things do not happen by themselves and they generally aren’t that interesting or good if they are not regularly updated. Finding someone to manage this and manage it well could be challenging.

Thinking about this for students, it’s easy to see how they might use this as well to share information with family and peers. It’s also easy to see how the school will want control over this to make sure posts are appropriate. Much of what we do at our school in this aspect is done through ePearl. This online portfolio is secure and allows students, teachers and families to interact and share school information.

New Knowledge
A couple of thoughts to wrap this up. I’ve thought a lot about how Facebook shares photos and the tagging process and the implication this might have for professionals. I think of the person who has a picture taken of them that they would not want posted online, the photo taker then posts that picture online and tags the people in the photo, consequently sharing that information with everyone. Sure the photo or tag can be removed, but damage could be done. I read in one of the blogs we needed to subscribe to that one prof was quoted as saying, “I have to believe that anytime my laptop is on, my life is not private.” Maybe a bit extreme, or maybe not extreme enough, but definitely a word of caution.

The other thing I wanted to share was about twitgoo. Does anyone out there know what this is? Have you had experience with it? I was playing with my photosharing site trying to share with my blog and my facebook page and clicked on the twitter feature. Suddenly, a picture of my daughter popped up in “twitgoo” and I was taken to a page where any “tweeters” can post photos. Within seconds 32 random people had viewed my picture, some made comments, and then the picture moved down the tweetgoo list and into obscurity. It was kind of a helpless feeling.