We know that students are snapping more photographs than ever before (largely thanks to photo options on cell phones). Now they can showcase a photograph and submit meaningful captions. “Pictory is a showcase for people around the world to document their lives and cultures. Anyone can submit one large, captioned image to each of Pictory’s editorial themes.” Give students an opportunity to submit their favorite photo and caption, but be aware….not all photographs will be published on this site and students can only submit one photo per category. The pressure of submitting only your best photo and caption should help encourage careful, thoughtful editing. Why just one photo? The editor of this site wants you (and your students) to pick your best image. The site is designed to help a diverse group of people put together collaborative photo essays.

I especially enjoyed exploring the images and reading the stories that were selected for the Overseas and Overwhelmed Pictory section. I do hope you will take time to peruse the photo essays included in that category. Currently there are several themes open for submission:

• The House I Grew Up In
• Local Delicacy
• The One Who Got Away
• Learning from Our Elders
• My Most Meaningful Image

Do’s and Dont’s as posted on the site…

• Do submit a photo that you took.
• Do write the caption yourself, and/or credit anyone who helps you.
• Do make sure your photo is at least 1000 pixels wide (at any height).
• Do pick one best photo for each theme, and make sure it’s a good fit.
• Do consider appropriateness for viewers of all ages when choosing your photo and writing your text.

• Don’t add text or watermarks to your images.
• Don’t stretch your photo in one dimension.
• Don’t send nude photos or inappropriate content.
• Don’t add borders to your image.
• Don’t send in illustrations, drawings, paintings, or other non-photographic images.

There are a number of Flickr mashups that are fun and in many instances useful. In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. Today I am sharing a few of my favorites.

1. Big Huge Labs – 40 fun ways you can manipulate Flickr images…my favorite Flickr mashups to date! (see my previous post: Big Huge Labs = Fun + Easy Integration).
2. Animal Photos! – Images on this site are under creative commons and are free to use on web sites and other projects.
3. Birds of the World – This service allows you to browse through list of all the birds of the world categorized by continent, country. Photos of the birds are fetched from Flickr service, shown along is a link to Wikipedia, with more information about the selected bird.
4. Bookr – a tool to create photobooks using Flickr images. Photobooks may be e-mailed or embedded in blogs. View my sample below…
5. Bubblr – fun flickr mashup that lets you add cartoon bubbles to photos. View my sample below…
6. Clockr – random digit images from Flickr to display the current time. Click on a number to change the image, doubleclick it to view the full image. Use the mouse wheel to cycle through.
7. Color Fields Colr Pickr – Great way to find Flickr photos by color. Select colors diretly or use the slider to adjust lightness and darkness.
8. Compfind – Find images for comps, research or inspiration. You can search using Creative Commons settings as well as safe settings.
9. Digipoem – generates visual representations of poetry and other text sources using folksonomic image tagging on Flickr.
   Text sources are also converted into an XML Poem format available to the user (DTD/Schema coming soon).
10. fastr – a fun Flickr game in which you view a set of ten images and try to guess the common tag. Time based scoring.
11. Flash Gallery – a free application that allows you to create a slideshow on your website easy and fast. You don’t need any programming skills to install or use it. Just embed it into your website and script will automatically form a slideshow from a specified folder or from Flickr photostream.
12. FlickIt! – a simple yet extremely useful web service for dynamically generating thumbnails of anything.

Look for more Flickr Fun recommendations in the future!

Do you know what an ambigram is? Douglas R. Hofstadter describes an ambigram as a “calligraphic design that manages to squeeze two different readings into the selfsame set of curves”. The first published reference to the term was by Hofstadter, who attributes the origin of the word to a friend. I hope you enjoy these ambigram generators and links included in my post today. Perhaps you can challenge your students to design an ambigram using their name or personal slogan.

Ambigram.net – Jonathan Gough, ambigram artist and designer, has posted a fascinating site that describes and features several examples of his ambigram art, as well as tutorial information that could be used to help students design their own ambigram art.

Ambigram.generator – flip any word, different words of the same length, or even an entire (symmetrically spaced) sentence on its head, and read it both ways!” Can you read the example below?

Wow Tattoos.com – The fact that I have included this tatto site does not mean that I sanction tattoos (actually, I feel tattoos are simply a personal choice), but the amigram art found on the site is quite interesting and it is fun to flip the artwork too! You can also generate artwork that could serve as inspiration for the ambigram artist in your classroom.

Flipscript – this site features an excellent ambigram generator. It also serves as a sales outlet for items that feature ambigram art.

Mathcats – learn about ambigrams and link to ambigram artwork from this site.

Ian Slegers Ambigramateur – visit this great blog to view some ambigram artwork like the sample below:

Ambigrams by Nagfa – another blog that features ambigram artwork. View the sample below as I end this post on a friendly note….