Flickrpoet and the Language Classroom

I became aware of FlickrPoet via a tweet on Twitter, and have been playing around with it a bit.

Here is how it works: you type in a poem or a phrase and it searches Flickr’s public collection for images tagged with those words, and then voila! it constructs a series of images in a “photo poem”.

It works quite well in English. But how about other languages?

This evening, during a snowsquall and while I was waiting for my teenage son to get home ( i.e. to distract me from worrying), I decided to play with it a bit…here is what I found:

Using the first few lines of Pablo Neruda’s “Oda a la alcahofa,” Flickrpoet created this image:

Click on the images to enlarge

(Note if these were “live” pages Flickr poet would let you click on an image and it would take you to the Flickr foto)

I then used Google translator to translate Neruda into English and then ran it through Flickrpoet again. Here are the results:

How about French?

How about a less commonly taught language, like, say, Russian?

Undaunted, and thinking the googles might have munged that one up, I tried another sentence in English and then converted it to Russian. “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs” or “Быстрый булок ленивые собаки” in Russian.

And the Flickrpoet result?

(I am thinking this has less to do with Flickr or Flickrpoet and more to do with my lack of Russian skillz)

In any event, it is an interesting tool. I am thinking this might work as a beginning of the semester icebreaker for students who are reluctant to blog and instead might be more comfortable with their words represented by images. Through the images, we can create more stories, or click on them and make connections to the actual people who took them. Who knows.

In the meantime, please help us out and give it a whirl in less commonly taught languages…and let us know your findings.

(PS the kid made it home just fine, thanks for asking 🙂 )