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.
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.
