Today’s post is about Flickr Albums! Canvas already has good integration with Flickr image search which makes it easy to include individual Flickr images in a Canvas Page, and you can even browser Flickr to find images to use as course cards.
Thanks to the great File-in-Page trick I learned at the Community last week, I’m now able to embed Flickr Albums in Canvas pages too. Here are step by step instructions: Step by Step Flickr Album in Canvas. Here’s a screenshot of am album in a Page:
So, in addition to being able to embed Flickr albums in other spaces (blog sidebars, webpages, etc.), now you can embed them in a Canvas page or in a Canvas discussion board. The iframe solution works in both spaces; here’s a screenshot of the same album in the Discussion Board. You can use an album to provide a range of visual prompts for the discussion, and the album approach allows students to respond to the one that most interests them — and they can easily access the Flickr photo page to grab the URL to include in their reply:
For people who have followed Flickr for a while, this embedded album option is really great to see! Years ago, Flickr had an excellent embedded slideshow option, but it was Flash-based. They discontinued that, with no other good option in place, but now this new embedded album has come along, and I think it is a very nice solution. I wish they would offer an embedded album option for displaying live search results (that would be really cool!), but this is certainly as good as the old slideshow, and in some ways it is better; I find it more visually appealing anyway.
When I wrote my last Aesop book (Mille Fabulae et Una), I created slideshows for my collections of Aesop illustrations, like this one from Steinhowel’s wonderful illustrated Aesop (hand-colored too!) circa 1500. As you can see, Flickr albums can serve all kinds of purposes; they don’t just have to be photos. Now that Flickr has this wonderful new embedding option, I am inspired to make more albums. 🙂
