Bookr: What is it? Another flickr toy (a mashup) by Pim Pam Pum (Barcelona, Spain). With Bookr you can create photo books using photos from flickr searching by tag or user. You can also browse their archive. You can also embed your (or anyone else’s) photo book in your blog.
I’m using Bookr for my own Flickr pictures (it’s a nice way to email your pics to friends) The final product looks like this (you can also click for a larger size, which will take you to Bookr site)
So, OF COURSE, I came up with the following ideas for the foreign language classroom:
- To use Bookr as a visual tool to provide Foreign Language teachers/students with an enjoyable way to memorize lists of vocabulary.
- It’s 2.0, so it’s based on ‘tags’ and ‘trust/share’. This allows users to reuse available books according to their learning needs. Since you can create a book with someone else’s pictures, you are also supposed to share your final product with the community.
- They give you the option to ‘recycle’ a book. Let’s say I have just created the following photo book from people’s pictures at flickr. It’s a book aimed at learning furniture-related vocab (for ABs in English).
- I just post this photo book to my blog and I tell my students to take a look at it (I haven’t told them what RSS is, yet,
) - And I can also tell them to recycle this photo book on furniture and add more pictures/vocab during their learning process (which may take a semester or a whole life, depending on their interest in learning the language).
This may require some previous training. I have to tell them how to use this tool. I think it’s a pretty easy one, really, just type the keyword/s (=tag) in the Tag field and drag and drop the pictures onto the book, name them, and that’s all. But, most of my students aren’t tech savvy precisely, far beyond digital immigration, if you know what I mean. In this case, I may devote 45 minutes of a regular class to a hands-on practice, because I think this kind of transversal knowledge is worth our students while. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think they’re going to learn a lot if they use this sort of tools in a meaningful way.
3. And if your students are already using 2.0 tools like these: flickr, blogs…You can ask them to create & post their own vocab books to their blogs (& recycle them according to their course level).
Still in its infancy, it’ d be great if we could do the following things:
- Save our work
- Edit the font type, size, color, and so on so forth…
- Resize the book size
- Write text in a page: we don’t want to add a photo but just write a brief text; so it’d look like more like a ‘tale’ book.
- Collaborate (invite other users to work on our photo book)
Pedir es gratis… Bookr found via Ñblog
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