Silicon Valley Musings

The state of California Department of Education has adopted a statewide content standard to “encourage the highest achievement of every student, by defining the knowledge, concepts, and skills that students should acquire at each grade level.” (CDE, 2005).

Many California teachers create their own customized, multi-media rich, lesson plans to simulate their students enthusiasm for subject.

Search systems like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN now make it easy to find photographs on the Internet. But it can be difficult and time consuming to find photos appropriate for particular subjects. I found this true while recently trying to create a lesson plan for fourth graders on erosion. (CDE “Science”, 2005).

I have created simple Flickr tagging convention that will allow teachers to contribute their photographs so they may be easily indexed and used by other teachers.

The Flickr CDE tag convention is as follows:

The CDE tags are a hierarchy of tags that reflect the structure of the standard content. The levels are:

1. CDE Content Standard
2. Subject
3. Grade Level
4. Subject Specialization
5. Section
6. Subsection

There is a tag for each level of the hierarchy. Each tag is qualified with the prefix “CDE:” to avoid conflicts with other Flickr tags. Each tag is based on the descriptions of the hierarchy presented on the CDE Website.

Flickr does not support spaces or other forms of punctuations (e.g. period or colon) in tags. In the CDE tags, eliminate the spaces and other punctuation. The only exception is to replace the “.” in section numbers (see below) with an ‘x’. For example the tag for the subject History-Social Science becomes CDE:HistorySocialScience and the tag for Section 1.0 becomes CDE:Section1×0.

This convention is not intended to be to onerous; there is no requirement to tag a photo with all six levels of CDE tags (it is also impossible to enforce). We do encourage contributors to include as many CDE tags as possible.

The convention uses six tags for two reasons: one to make it easy to contribute photos and then add or refine the CDE tags later, and second to allow for “wild card” searches across multiple tags. For example, you may want to search for all CDE tagged photographs relevant to fourth graders independent of subject. Or search for all CDE Science photos for both fourth and fifth grades. The CDE tagging conventions anticipates these kinds of searches.

Examples of CDE tags:

1. Top level tag: CDE
2. Subject: CDE:EnglishLanguage, CDE:Mathematics, CDE:HistorySocialScience, CDE:Science, CDE:VisualAndPerformingArts
3. Grade: CDE:Kindergarten, CDE:GradeOne, CDE:GradeTwo, … CDE:GradeEight, CDE:GradesNineThroughTwelve
4. Subject Specialization: CDE:Reading, CDE:Writing, CDE:NumberSense, CDE:CaliforniaAChangingState
5. Section: CDE:Section1×0, CDE:Section2×1, CDE:Section4
6. Subsection: CDE:SubsectionA, CDE:Subsection1×4

When teachers do find photographs or illustrations, they are very often restricted by copyright. This makes it difficult for teachers to share their resulting lessons with parents or teachers at other schools. So I encourage anyone contributing photographs with CDE tags to do so under a Creative Commons license (Creative Commons, 2005) (Flickr 2005).

Some examples can be found here.

Discuss it further here.

References

California Department of Education (CDE), Content Standards – Standards and Frameworks, In Curriculum & Instruction. Retreived July 2005, from http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/index.asp.

California Department of Education (CDE), Content Standards – Standards and Frameworks, In Grade Four, Science. Retreived July 2005, from http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/scgrade4.asp

Creative Commons, Images, In Images Section, Retrieved July 2005, from http://creativecommons.org/image/

Flickr, Select a default license for your photos, On Your Account Section, Retrieved July 200,5, from http://www.flickr.com/profile_license.gne