There are several Flickr programs that allow you and your students to find tags associated or clustered with the initial tag you searched for.
Flickstorm sorts by topic rather quickly – bottom half has tags
http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
Airtight Interactive Type in a term, see images about the term and see connections
http://www.airtightinteractive.com/projects/related_tag_browser/app/
Tagnautica shows the associated tags and images (my favorite visual association so far)
http://www.quasimondo.com/tagnautica.php
Flickr clustering allows for clustering of ideas so that “bill” can be clustered in numerous ways. Type in the tag and then click on cluster
http://flickr.com/photos/tags/bill/clusters
This can be a great educational game for your students. You think of a tag like ice for your science unit and then you ask the students to list all the related tags (categories) that they can think of. Then type “ice” into one of the above and compare the tags to the students. Have the students determine which are science categories and which are non-scientific categories. This type of inference thinking helps to broaden the students’ thinking and helps them to think in terms of connections instead of one isolated term. They have to compare and contrast tags.
So how do you have you students develop tag (category) building through Flickr?
© Harry Grover Tuttle, 2007
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