One of my not so successful experiments with the Yearbook class of 2005-2006 had the students creating their own accounts in Fotopages. It was not only to encourage them to take pictures and develop their photography skills. I believed then and still believe now that students, and people in general, need to practice caption writing. The reason why it was not successful was that the students hated writing captions, and most of the guys were not interested in taking pictures. Some of them hated the assignment so much — to update their photo blog weekly — that they asked me not to do it again when they signed up for the class the following year.
Things have changed much since Facebook came to our school. Not only do they take a bunch of photos with their mobile phones, they also upload these within hours on their Facebook accounts … sometimes with descriptive titles and captions, but not always.
I would really like to do this exercise again, although I don’t want to teach Yearbook anymore. And Fotopages is still the best site for this. Sure I have paid accounts with Flickr and Webshots, but the nice feature about students using Fotopages is their site can be password-protected, but viewers don’t have to open an account to view the students’ sites. This is how I set up my personal account which is now my baby’s photo blog, so family and relatives can watch him grow.
Features that I like include the comments and smiley faces, as well as the restored Statistics page. Unlike Flickr, however, the comments are per post not per photo. You won’t know either how many views a picture gets, unless you post one picture only per day. The other thing that I don’t like about Fotopages is their Most Popular Fotopages, because “popular” is not synonymous to good photography here. So I’m pleased to see that they added the “Editors’ Choice” section, even though none of my photos since 2004 have ever been selected.
