Replied to Random Access Poetry: The Day Before Writing by dogtrax (dogtrax.edublogs.org)
This month, in connection with April’s random designation as Poetry Month, I want to use images and photography and art as inspiration, and after a call out to some friends on Twitter for some help, as I wondered how I might access a random Creative Commons image from Flickr when I need one, I have settled on a couple of paths forward.

Hi Kevin,

I love the random so love this idea.You mentions a couple of my toys/tools along side some others.

The Random Flickr blendr was originally thought of as a sort of contemplation toy, so I avoided making it easy to grab images. I guess I could make that easier now there seems to be a purpose.  I think FlickrCC Stampr used to have a url parameter to kick off a search I’ll look at adding that back in at times.

Side note, I remember Ben Rimes Poetry for People blog. Now gone but discussed here: Come Write Poetry With Me This April! – The Tech Savvy Educator

Update, 1-April-19 : I’ve made a couple of changes that might be useful:

http://johnjohnston.info/fcc/?s=poem adding ?s=searchword will preload the flickr search

On Random Flickr Blendr I’ve added a pause button and move the links for better screenshotting. I changed the links to flickr shortlinks so they can be read from an image (Not very accessible!)

Here’s a fun thing to try if you’ve been blogging for a while (Warning: may not actually be fun). Get a random date from when you started blogging until present (eg using this random date generator), find the post nearest that date and revisit it.
….

  1. What, if anything, is still relevant?
  2. What has changed?
  3. Does this reveal anything more generally about my discipline?
  4. What is my personal reaction to it?

from: Revisiting my own (blog) past | The Ed TechieThe Ed Techie

I’ve a random button1 here and occasionally look back without the the discipline that Martin Weller suggested.  I gave this more thoughtful approach a go.

I came up with this: Impermanence and Comments from 10 years ago.

That post was just a placeholder to link to a favourite post by one of my pupils. There was not much analysis, but hopefully pointing out that pupils posting and engaging with an audience is a powerful tool in the classroom.

I do think this is still relevant, there are a lot more primary school using Social media and blogging now as there was then. I also think that it is good to have examples of pupils doing the blogging and that can have value. Now it seems like a lot of posts come from teachers as opposed to learners.

It is also particularly relevant to me as I’ll be returning, with some trepidation, to class teaching after more than eight years next week.

What has changes is the average 10 year old is a lot more used to publishing to the Internet, plenty use FaceBook, instagram or have a YouTube channel. I wonder if writing for the web will have the same excitement.

I am not sure such a short post reveals anything about my discipline, except that I’ve consistently believed that blogging should help to give an audience and purpose to pupil writing and learning.

My personal reaction was quiet pleasure at finding the pupil’s poem and the cross continent conversation that went with it. I do hope I can help provide opportunities for pupils to do the same again.

Finally I remembered that the Sandaig Site will probably be decommissioned very soon. This made me a little sad. It did let me edit the post and click the amber button to send the original poem post to the Internet archive.

Screen Shot 2016-08-10 at 12.20.50

The Featured image on this post is one of my own flickr photos, created by blending two random CC flickr photos, with this toy or its slightly older sibling.

1. The link on my blog uses a trick appending /?random to a WordPress blog url gives a random post, I learnt that from an old dog.