BP14_2009113_Comment on David's Scrapblogging

P9_1182009_From Scrapbooking to Scrapblogging

Remember when English teachers used to ask students to cut pictures out of magazines to create a collage to represent either the student or some character from literature? The students would flip through magazines that appealed to their interests looking for something they thought represented their interests, or more likely, looked for images they thought were cool and then came up with a reason for including the image. Such examples often came through as "I like snowboarding so I put a picture of Shaun White (The Flying Tomato) on my collage."

When I used to use this activity, students struggled to move past the literal level of meaning, which is why the collages often ended up being a collection of "likes" rather than a picture of the student's personality. I stopped using this activity due to the frustration of hearing "I like..." statements all day long.

However, using bothFlickr and Scrapblog, this activity is ready to be revived. Instead of flipping pages in a magazine, students can search conceptually. What images are returned when one searches for "stubborn" in Flickr? These are only two of the images that are returned using this search. Students can be as literal or as symbolic as they wish, depending on their needs and intentions.

WithinScrapblog students can create scrapbooking-style pages that can be used for autobiography of the student, for the student to create a biography of a particular author through images and text, or to create a character analysis or summary.

Other activities could include explorations of historical figures, an artist's scrapbooked portfolio, or a student creating a scrapbook based on a virtual or real-life field trip.

The tool presents students with a variety of templates, which are customizable, and the students can share the resource and results with fellow students and with teachers. Creating the Scrapblog is relatively simple, and users will find that importing pictures is as simple as dragging and dropping into a part of the template. The result of the Scrapblog is a shareable, fun artifact that students will engage in. One example of a student-created scrapblog page is this one from a French-language student.