Ed Tech Ideas

Grabbing images from Google is one of the easiest things there is to do. You simply search, copy, paste. A no-brainer. However, when using someone else’s photos, how do you know if you have permission? Students need to be taught about copyright and how to find royalty-free images that are ok to use in projects. Below are four great sites that I use with my students.

Pics4Learning

Pics4Learning, as the site says, “Is a safe, free image library for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos and images for classrooms, multimedia projects, web sites, videos, portfolios, or any other project in an educational setting.” It’s easy to use and all of the copyright information is available in a simplistic bibliography underneath any chosen photo.

flickrCC

flickrCC is a good place to start for Creative Commons images. The panel on the left of the original displays the first 36 photos matching your search term. Click on any of these thumbnails to get a slightly larger image and the attribution details displayed in the right hand section. Right-click the image and ‘save image as’ if you want to use this size, or click on the link in the attribution text to go to flickr and chose a different sized image. Don’t forget to include the attribution text in any work you produce using the picture.

Fotopedia

Fotopedia has a nice layout with an “endless” scrolling feature. Students don’t have to click next all the time and wait for more images to load – results just keep coming up as you scroll, a-la Google Images. After finding a photo that fits the bill, simply click on the info sign that appears when you hover over the picture. That will open up the larger sized image in a new tab with all of the attributions on the right-hand side. A nice aspect of Fotopedia that flickrCC does not have yet is that you can flag any photo for inappropriateness. There’s also a handy embed feature that allows you to re-size any photo and embed it in a blog (doesn’t work with WordPress hosted sites, unfortunately) that shows up with the attribution already done for you.

Flickr Storm

Flickr Storm is similar to flickrCC. You simply run a search, click on a thumbnail and the photo appears on the right. Make sure to have your students click on the advanced search feature which allows them to limit their searches to Non-Commercial and Share Alike photos. One nice feature about Flickr Storm is the “Add to Tray.” You can add several photos to your tray and then when you open your tray, all the photos are there in large sized format along with the attributions.