Week 2, Thing 5

I just played around with a ton of the Flickr mashups (maybe a little too long!)  The two that stick out first in my memory are the Flickr Color Pickr (http://www.krazydad.com/colrpickr/) and the API called Retrievr (http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/), mostly because they both exhibit clever ingenuity.  I wonder if some middle school students could look at how these programs are created and design their own (we just finished some basic programming, and I'm looking into finding some challenge activities).  Also, I recently taught some basic Microsoft Word skills to sixth graders and used color poems as the writing prompt (tables with a list of ten creative colors in one column and imaginative descriptors in the other column, for example: plain grey feels like chills in my spine).  If students type each color as word art, they could then utilize the Color Pickr to insert brilliant pictures as the fill effects.