Research Using Flickr in South America

Text Talk: Classroom Stories (Adelina Moura & Ana Amelia Carvalho, Secondary Vocational Class, Portugal)
As part of the Mobile Generation2 project, we planned a teaching and learning experiment to evaluate the influence of mobile learning in students’ engagement in the activity. Students used their Mobile Phone and Mobile Flickr service. It was a field study regarding the Baroque, to be carried out using the phone, and was inserted into the curriculum development activities. Braga, in the northern of Portugal, is a Baroque city, so we asked the students, of a vocational class of Carlos Amarante Secondary School, to take some pictures of the different baroque monuments in the city, using their own cell phones, and to send them by email from the phone to the Mobile Flickr Website3. The colleagues who were in the classroom prepare the information for each monument and discuss about the features of this architectural style.

Those students whose mobile phones included a camera and had an email service went outside for data collection. The other pupils waited in the classroom for publication of the pictures on Mobile Flickr. These students, using a laptop connected to the Internet, researched information about the monuments and wrote a text to subtitle each image. Students who did the fieldwork had to send an SMS to their colleagues in the classroom to tell them about work development and to ask if there were any difficulties or requests for clarification. Students who remained in the classroom as they received messages had to give information to the teacher and prepare a response if necessary. It was an interesting collaborative learning experiment through mobile
technologies because all students participated actively and learning became more flexible, extending the teaching and learning process.