5 inspiring ‘photography’ sites

As I have mentioned a couple of times in my previous posts, I am very into photography. Also, I’m always looking for projects that can combine my hobby with teaching English (for example, Mathilde Verillaud’sselfies project).

Photography can be defined as ‘drawing with light’… but it’s not just any drawing. Pictures transmit feelings, ideas, concepts… a single photograph contains loads of information not only about what they show but also about the photographer himself.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much a photograph represents and the huge amount of pictures around us… in magazines, webpages, leaflets, newspapers, advertisements… and of course, coursebooks and flashcards in the English classroom! In the classroom, we use pictures so as to elicit vocabulary, to play games, to encourage speaking and writing, to create visual associations with vocabulary or ideas, to avoid translating, to decorate the classroom, among many other things. Showing our students a picture is much more useful than giving them a bunch of long definitions our students are not likely to remember or understand.

When I took a photography course last year, one of my teachers told me that one tip to become a better photographer is to look at other photographers’ pictures. Well, that is how I came up with these sites, which contain thousands of free pictures we can use in our lessons.

1) Tumblr.

Tumblr is a microblogging platform and social networking website that allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog.

2) Pinterest.

Pinterest is a company that provides an Internet service that they describe as a ‘visual discovery tool’. People use Pinterest to collect ideas for projects and interests and users create and share collections (called “boards”) of visual bookmarks (called “Pins”) that they use to do things like plan trips, develop projects, organize events or save articles and recipes.

3) Weheartit.

Similar to Pinterest, We Heart It is an image-based social network for inspiring images. It allows users to upload and share pictures, and also save (heart) their favourites into a private canvas. 

4) Flickr.

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website. It is very popular among professional and amateur photographers, who upload their pieces of work, and it also is widely used by photo researchers and by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

5) Instagram.

Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr. It confines photos to a square shape and users can also apply digital filters to their images.

If you are looking for inspiring pictures for whatever activity you are planning, any of these sites will do. And yes, I've signed up in all of them ;)

One of my favourite quotes to close…

‘You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved’ ― Ansel Adams.

Want to know what to do with the pictures you find? Here's an article with 7 Pinterest ideas for high school writing and another one with 10 ways to use Instagram in your classroom.

Working with selfies in the ELT classroom

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a talk called ‘Selfies: a fast track to boost students’ motivation’ delivered by Mathilde Verillaud. The talk was, as the title says, using ‘selfies’ in the ELT classroom, which is something I couldn’t imagine until I went to listen to Mathilde.

Personally, I am very into photography. However, I’d never thought of using these kind of self-portraits in the classroom… mainly because I didn’t consider them to be real photography. I changed my mind a bit after the talk, though.

Mathilde talked about her work with Chinese students and her project with selfies. First, she taught them some basic rules of photography such as the rule of thirds, perspectives, taking into account the background, among others. Then, the students took their own selfies, and finally they used those pictures to carry out many different activities like writing poetry and stories, creating a gallery, eliciting ideas and many more.

Selfies are a way of showing your life and presenting yourself to the world. A project with selfies is not only fun, but also opens up the opportunity for an infinite number of subsequent activities.

The selfies, so fashionable nowadays, are a way of engaging our students. By using them, we can show them that they can mix English with things they do every day – taking pictures of themselves and their lives. We can also help them realise all the things a picture tells about someone and, of course, make the English lesson a lot more enjoyable and updated with practically no more materials than a smartphone. 

A famous selfie to close! This selfie was taken by Ellen Degeneres at the 2014 Academy Awards Ceremony and it was one of the most retweeted photos ever.

And also, the most perfectly-timed selfie I've ever seen. This one was taken during a Chelsea match.

There is an example of Mathilde's project in this link.