As I prepare myself for March is Reading Month, I found this gem of a site tucked away in one of my numerous lists of bookmarks that I thought might come in handy. That and it’s been quite some time since I just posted a fun site for playing. Spell with Flickr is one of those fun sites. A with a little work, it could be quite educational as well.
The site is pretty simple. Just one page with a text field to type in whatever you want spelled out. Once you type in your text, click on the “spell” button, and the site pulls images of letters from the photo-sharing site, Flickr. Simple. If you don’t like the images it gives you, you can click on each one and get a new random letter pulled from the Flickr database. From there you can print it off, save it, grab the RSS feed for each letter, OR copy and paste the code to place it on another website. Which of course, leads to the sticky issue of whether or not the images being used are covered under a creative commons license for sharing (which I’ll leave for a later post).
What to do with such a fun tool? You could have fun creating words for a weekly word wall update, printing them off and taping them on the wall. You could have the students use the images to create their own custom letter heads with any word processor. OR, you could use it in an art or graphic design class to help spur a conversation about fonts, architecture, or photography. Then again, you could just have fun spelling a bunch of words, and seeing how many pictures of each letter you can get.
Have fun spelling 🙂
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This is great! Just the thing for those “Happy Birthday” or “Good-bye” signs at work. Thanks for sharing the link.
I would help create an incentive for typing spelling words in the real young grades. I am always looking for a way to get them to practice on the keyboard because typing is so boring……
I will probably give a try before the year is out.
How about using the Flickr examples for inspiration and having the kids create their own original designs for the letters? You could assign each student a letter and ask them to produce three or more different designs and build a nice collection of originals to use for your bulletin boards or art displays. Good experience for all those budding graphic artists in your class.