#11 Bubblr

What is it? What does it do?

Bubblr by Pimpampum is a simple and effective photo-based tool which students could easily use to produce a comic-strip (slide-show) style presentation.  It uses the huge Yahoo owned image repository, Flickr, which boasts over 6 billion images.    
Not all the images are available, however, as it depends the Flickr user has opened up the photos with a non-commercial Creative Commons licence.  You can see exactly how many photos on Flickr have been offered the different types of CC licence usage here.  It's only a fraction of the 6 billion but still provides a wealth of material to use in Bubblr.  The image quality is consistently good as well.

To play with Bubblr I unearthed some photos from my trip to Tanzania and, in particular, a 5-day trek up Mount Kilimanjaro.  At first these did not show up when I searched using the tag 'Kilimanjaro'. Plenty of other photos did.  As I wanted to do a comic-strip using my own photos, I had to change the licence terms from 'All Rights Reserved' first.  In addition, to find only my photos I had to add a unique tag, 'Ashantikili'.  Although if you upload a newly-tagged set then a Bubblr search jusing any tag will probably bring up yours first.  Or you can search by User - I'm known as Teacher Phili, unsurprisingly.

It is very easy to drag and drop a selection of images onto your comic-strip, although can take a little longer if you are arranging photos in some kind of chronological sequence, which I needed to as I was 'showing' a narrative over 5 days.   Then you can add one of 3 kinds of text bubble to each image, which can then form the basis of a presentation or these can do all the 'talking' themselves.  There are no limit to the number of bubbles that can be added but too many might devalue the image.  Frames can be inserted before or after slides, but it takes a while to get used to not deleting images already added, which then need to be located again. 

 
Pimpampum also created Bookr, which is very similar to Bubblr, but presents the photos in a stylish, turnable book format.

Bubblr is very easy for students to use. You don't need to sign in or create an account. Finding relevant photos is straightforward if the user is not too fussy or specific.  Even without an existing Yahoo/Flickr account, students can find a wealth of images to form the basis of a descriptive presentation, tell a story or narrative an event in their lives.  Adding bubbles is a fun and interesting way to express opinion or invent dialogue - if the images show people.  

• It could be used in the classroom for:

• storytelling - students find images which build up a narrative which then has text added like a proper comic-strip. 
• personal backgrounds - about where a student is from, their hometown/country, local cusine etc. Great for earlier lessons when students have to introduce themselves to the class.
• caption competition - an extension of the idea of adding 'funny texts or dialogue to images, often involving people or animals.  The speech or thought bubbles could be used here.
• Correcting errors - student can view the Bubblr archive (of previously made strips) and  'recycle' one which has errors or needs improving/changing. 
• Presenting - more elaborate ideas could involve running the strip through screen capture software to add a voiceover.
• A strip could also be easily constructed at home as an out of class activity.  Published strips can be emailed or embedded into a blog when complete.

• Personally, I can see a number of limitations with this tool.  For starters, the photos accessible are only those with one of the six differnet versions of Creative Commons licence - around 220 million.   Non-copyrighted/all rights reserved/watermarked images are obviously excluded.
• Navigation is a little clumsy.  The 'After current' frame button doesn't appear clearly in my browser.  You have to be careful not to delete or replace photos accidentally.  Scrolling along the strip usually works but images can overshoot, which is an issue if you want to do a screen capture with it.
• The search terms are limited.  Unless a student uses a specific term/set of photos or uploads their own, they may struggle to get exactly the images they want.  Only 17 images are shown at once and in the order they have been uploaded onto Flickr (most recent first).
• The bubbles are too basic, and not particularly editable. Text can only be in one style, no bold or font types, for example.  Images might vary in size depending on original source.
• There is no option to add audio.
• It doesn't seem possible to delete a strip once published, presumably because then you could delete strips created by others.
• There are not many options or fancy variations for the strip.
• On several occasions the Adobe Flash plug-in crashed when using and I was initially unable to access my finished strip from the archive.  When I tried to embed the remixed version in the blog, it also crashed...

With patience and some effort - the version shown is the remixed Bubblr version which I published and then recycled (improved) - I did manage to get a strip together, recorded it with Jing (see #12) and added some instrumental music*, before publishing it with Camtasia and posting on YouTube. This, however, defeats the point of using Bubblr in the first place.

*This video, PHILI DOES KILI includes content that is licenced and sold by RECISIO and was purchased by this user before adding, unmodified to the finished video.  It is matched third-party content that is owned or licensed by UMPG Publishing, although this still enables it to be shown on YouTube.