Thing 8 - Flickr Mashups

This blog is dedicated to Flickr mashups and third party tools.  I chose two sites from the ones listed to play and experiment with.  This took much more time than I thought it would.  I spent about a day on it and experienced various levels of frustration.

First, I had to decide which mashups/tools that I wanted to use.  I was disheartened when I would find one that sounded fun and interesting only to find out that I had to purchase it or that it was only available to use on an iPhone.  I finally found one that was free and available to use on my PC, Blubblr. 

Bubblr is a mashup where users can create cartoons using Flickr photos.  You can create just one slide or many slides.  A search tool is available to search the Flickr commons for photos to use.  I searched “cats” and “funny cats” to create my cartoon.  Three text bubbles are available to place on the photos that you choose.  They are a speech bubble, thought bubble and a rectangle box.  It was pretty easy to create.  The hardest part was picking out photos and thinking of what to write.

This mashup would be good to use in class for an introduction to a new subject area.  It can also be used to create silly reminders for the students.  It is a tool that can add some fun to directions, reminders, or subject matters.

 

 

 

The next mashup that I found is Trippermap.  This mashup takes your photos from Flickr and puts them on a flash map that you can use on blogs and websites.  There is a free version, as well as a premium version.  The free version allows you to place fifty locations.  The premium version, which costs $9.75 annually, includes unlimited locations, route lines, Google earth link, custom colors, Google map version, first priority in scanning Flickr photos and EXIF support.  For my map, I utilized the free version.

To start, you need to create a Trippermap account, which was easy to do.  Then you enter your e-mail for Flickr and Trippermap pulls your public photos with location tags and places them on the map.  It is much easier to tag your photos first, before setting up the Trippermap account, as I discovered the hard way.  If you follow their directions it has you place your photos on the Flickr map and says it will pull those photos onto your Trippermap.  I did this and waited for it to scan the photos only to discover an empty map.  I went back into Flickr and tagged my photos and had Trippermap rescan them and eventually they appeared on the map.

The downside of this tool is that you have to tell Trippermap to rescan or scan for new photos when you want to add more to your map.  This takes some time to do.  It took a few hours for me.  With the free version there was nothing indicating that the photos were being scanned (like a bar).  I just left my Trippermap account open and waited.  I don’t think it had finished scanning when I selected “get my map”, but I had a handful of photos on my map, which was good enough at this point.  The tool advises that it will send you an e-mail when your map is ready, which it did the first time.  However, I never received another notification after I had it rescan my photos.

I’m sure that once you get the hang of it, Trippermap would be much easier to use.  For me, it was just too time consuming and frustrating.  Tagging your photos in Flickr with their geographic location when you upload them will allow a smoother experience.  I don’t think that I would use this tool in my personal life or as a teacher.  It may be a good tool for a geography class, or, perhaps, if students are reading about someone’s travels.  I just kept thinking that Flickr has a map tool so why use this.  The only plus is that you can post it on a blog or website.  Of course, if you spring for the premium version, you can customize the map as well.

There are many different mashups and tools available online.  I’m sure if I took the time I could find more to use in a classroom setting.  It would help if I had a specific type of tool in mind that I was looking for rather than just blindly searching.

 

 

Side note:  Of the photos I shared online, I did not include any with people in them.  I just don’t feel comfortable sharing pictures of my family to the world.