My dog, Morrison, smiling in a canoe.

Pechaflickr is a neat little tool built by Alan Levine. Pechaflickr displays twenty random images pulled from Flickr based on a tag (keyword) that you enter. For example, enter the word dog and twenty pictures of dogs will appear. But all of the the images don’t appear at once. Instead each one appears for only twenty seconds. Alan built the tool as a fun way to get people to try their skills at giving impromptu presentations. But as he wrote in a recent blog post, people are using it in other ways like learning a second language.

Applications for Education
As I tested Pechaflickr I started to think about using it as a source of story starters for students. Enter a tag into Pechaflickr and as each image appears have students try to write down the first word or sentence that comes to mind. At the end of the set of images students can pick their favorite images to write about in their stories.