A New Tool to Search for Images Licensed for School Use

November, 2014
Photos for Class is a very good web tool that you and your students can use to search for and download Creative Common licensed images. The search engine of Photos for Class uses Flickr safe search to return results that are licensed for school use.

What I really like the most about this web tool is the fact that it makes it easy for you to properly attribute images particularly for printed or presented materials. Any picture you download from Photos for Class will have a watermarked section that contains the name of the author, the name of the photo, a link to the original photo, the name and type of license along with a link to read it. No worry about plagiarism or stolen work any more.

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Wikimedia Commons Offers over 20 Million of Free Usable Media

September 14, 2014
Wikimedia Commons is a great platform where you can have access to over 20 million freely usable media files. Students can use these resources to search for images, sounds and clips to re-use in their multimedia projects in class. While most of the content in Wikimedia Commons is in public domain or under open content licenses, students should nonetheless verify the copyright status of each image just as they would do when obtaining images from other sources.

There are two ways to search for content on Wkimedia Commons: either through the use of the search box located in the top right hand side or through the links in the right column.You can browse through the different categories to narrow down your search query. Also, you can search for content by location, type, author, license or by source.

Another good feature on Wikimedia Commons is called Featured pictures. These are images that the community has chosen to be highlighted as some of the finest on Commons. This page is a gallery of the various pictures - photographs, computerised graphics, animated media, etc. There are currently 6,509 of such images in the Commons repository . You can find all featured pictures in a category called Featured pictures on Wikimedia Commons.

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Tons of Free public Domain Materials to Use in Class

September 16, 2014
Public Domain Review, as its name indicate, is a website that provides users with access to a plethora of public domain materials ideal for classroom use. These materials include things such as books, essays, historical images, art galleries, audio recordings. There are two main parts of Public Domain Review:

1- Collections

This is a curated selection of images, books, audio and film. You can browse the content in this section either  by medium ( images, books, film, audio),by time ( from pre-16th t 20th century), by tag or by source.  For each of the material you find you will be provided with directions to help you download and save it.

2- Essays

This section features essays written by renowned scholars , writers and artists. Every fortnight Public Domain Review publishes a long-form essay. All of these essays are arranged into different categories including: poetry, religion, philosophy, science and medicine,culture and history, and literature.

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Over 2 Million Historical Pictures Are Now Available on Flickr

September 2, 2014
Internet Archive Book Images features over 2 millions historical pictures on Flickr. This tremendous work has been done by Kalev Leetaru from Georgetown University. The pictures and drawings included in this resource are extracted from over 600 million library book pages scanned in by the Internet Archive organization.

Recognizing the fact that the digitization of the human knowledge has overlooked the presence of pictures in most of the books and works that were turned into PDF formats, Kalev took it upon him to source the pictures that are buried within these digitized books and arrange them in a format that can be easily searched and accessed. Kalev's project is sponsored by Yahoo, the owner of Flickr.

"For all these years all the libraries have been digitising their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works," he told the BBC.

Kalev has uploaded over 2.6 millions pictures that range from the year 1500 to 1922. This data mine of pictures is easily searchable using tags that have been automatically added to them. As a teacher, youprobably could draw on this resource to look for CC licensed pictures to use with students in class. Give it a try and see if you like it.

Courtesy of BBC

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A Resource of Over 100.000 Free Images to Use in Class

August 1, 2014
Here is another great resource of free images for teachers and students to use in class.Welcome Library made freely available more than 100,000 high resolution images. These materials include a wide variety of historical manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and many more.

All of these images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license which means that you can use them for free as long as you acknowledge Welcome Library as being the sources. You can also make free copies, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon them as you like.
Welcome Images provides 6 main collections of images : Life, Genes & You, Mind & Body, Sickness & Health, Time & Place, Science & Art, AND Education. Clicking on any of these categories will take you to a page where you can browse through the collections of images hosted.

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Teachers' Ultimate Directory of Free Image Sources

July 9, 2014
Here is a great and comprehensive directory of free image sources compiled by The Edublogger. This collection is specifically created to help teachers, educators and students have instant access to a wide variety of web resources where they can search for and access free images.The sources featured in this directory are organized according to these 4 criteria:

Subjects:
This has to do with whether the resource is genre-specific or just a mass collection of different images.

High Resolution:
This shows whether the images have a high resolution quality that makes them suitable for editing and printing or not.

License:
This is about the kind of licenses under which images are listed: These licenses vary from Creative Commons, Public domain, to unique licenses that allow users to download or embed them.

Safety
This shows whether the resource is safe for student use or not.

The image resources included in this directory are arranged into the following categories:

Search engines
These are search engines that help you search for free images.

Large crowdsourced collections
These are collections provided by users on a vast network of platforms.

US government collections
These are images provided by the different officers of US government. The images are public domain (unless otherwise noted).

Unique collections
These resources are provided by individuals or small to medium-sized networks of users.

Specific subjects
These are specifically curated image resources. The images are arranged according to specific niches they pertain to.

Clipart
These resources features  a wide variety of clip arts, diagrams, cartoons and several other visuals.

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