Visual literacy: Flickr-fed web 2.0 tools

I am positively convinced of the potential of using images to develop language so I have put together a collection of very interesting web 2.0 tools that feed from Flickr, an online photo sharing platform.

Flickr CC search allows you to find images within Flickr that are under a Creative Commons (CC) license. This is indeed useful when we teach our students about copyright issues.

Tag Galaxy is another creative way of searching images from Flickr. You enter a tag and then narrow your search adding other tags. The search parameters are shown as planets.


When you are satisfied you click on the chosen tag bundle and you get a sphere covered in the images corresponding to those tags. This is how "Audrey + Hepburn + portrait" looks


FlickrPoet generates a visual representation of a poem of phrase. In the example you can see a haiku come to life through related images. Although it is very attractive, there is no possibility of choosing the images.

Phrasr is a tool that allows you to illustrate a sentence of your choice with images taken from Flickr. It is useful for working on word and image associations because you are given options and you have to select an image for each word in the sentence.


This an example of a sentence created by my daughter Jazmin (so bear with the spelling mistakes). It is about her cat Morgan, who, by the way, looks just like the white cat in a hat!!!

A very similar tool is Flillustrator

Bookr allows you to create a book from Creative Commons images taken from Flickr. You choose the images and you can write captions under them. They are great for simple vocabulary books or for more sophisticated digital storytelling. The books can then be embedded somewhere else!

Bubblr is similar to Bookr but instead of creating a book you create a sliding stream of pictures to which you can add captions in the form of speech bubbles.


The final product is also embeddable and looks like this.

You can check Russell Stannard's detailed Bubblr tutorial on his great site Teacher Training Videos.

Earth Album is an interesting mashup between Flickr and Google maps. You can search images according to geographical location by clicking on any place in the map.


Once you have the image strip at the top, when you click on any image you can see a larger size and its information or caption.


Gickr allows you to create animated gifs based from selected images from Flickr. This is the Puente de la Mujer in Puerto Madero, Argentina.

Make your own animation


Flickr-based games are abundant and have already been blogged about so I'd rather send you to the original blog post by GeekTonic.com.


I hope you have discovered some new tools and ways to use Flickr images. If you have any ideas about other tools or how to use these ones, please leave a comment.