1. Expanding Visual Opportunities
in the ESL Classroom
“The presence of visual elements in today’s
teaching and learning is increasing as the integration of images and visual presentations with text in textbooks, instructional manuals, classroom presentations, and computer interfaces broadens” (Benson, 1997; Branton, 1999; Dwyer 1999).

2. What is ?
Wikipedia: “Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media”.

3. store, sort, search, and share
online photo management

4. Connectivism Networked and Social Learning
Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing.
way to connect and share our experiences and views through visual means

5. Connectivism Cont’d Principles of Connectivism:
Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
Learning is a process of connecting specialized information sources.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known.

6. Connectivism Cont’d Principles of Connectivism:
Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality.

7. Connectivism Cont’d Conceptual Connections
Concepts provide the basis for discussion, reflection, and cross- referencing from the learner’s own life experience and existing knowledge. We start with the concepts and try to relate specific language items to them by using those items for what they are designed to do: to describe concepts. (Carroll, 2008)
The language learning is almost as a bi-product of the conversation, the reflection, etc. (Carroll, 2008)
We hang the language onto the concepts, not the other way round. It is also very clear that learners are far more willing to engage with real concepts that connect with their lives than with grammatical abstractions that do not. (Carroll, 2008)

8. Sociocultural Theory
Learning through social interactions, current conceptualizations of sociocultural theory draw heavily on the work of Vygotsky (1986), as well as later theoreticians (see, for example, Wertsch, 1991, 1998).
According to Tharp and Gallimore (1988) "This view [the sociocultural perspective] has profound implications for teaching, schooling, and education. A key feature of this emergent view of human development is that higher order functions develop out of social interaction. Vygotsky argues that a child's development cannot be understood by a study of the individual. We must also examine the external social world in which that individual life has developed.
Through participation in activities that require cognitive and communicative functions, children are drawn into the use of these functions in ways that nurture and 'scaffold' them" (pp. 6-7). Kublin et al (1998) succinctly state that "Vygotsky (1934/1986) described learning as being embedded within social events and occurring as a child interacts with people, objects, and events in the environment" (p. 287).

9. In the Classroom Flickr can be used to…
stay in touch and share with people around the world
can be a visual language learning and teaching tool
image share
connect visuals to meanings
create detailed vocabulary and sentence structure
find photos to align writing pieces
source conversations
encourage personalization and record work/projects
support visual learners

10. Activity 1 Descriptive Break into two groups Go to flickr.com
Under the search filter type “New York” keep everyone’s photos selected
Choose one picture as a group
Together write down 4 sentences that describe your picture.

11. Activity 2 Create Captions/Dialogue
For the following photos in groups fill in the speech bubbles

14. Activity 3 Find your favorites using flickr. Food Sport Color Animal
Place
Etc.
Write a sentence to go along with your pictures