Share Your Tips For Creating and/or Finding Images For Blog Posts

Image of Site BlockedProblem! You want to use Creative Commons images with your students but can’t access Flickr because its blocked at your school.

What options does this leave you? Especially if it needs to be student-safe. Unfortunately this scenario is faced by many educators as highlighted by tilgunas comment on Finding and Adding Creative Commons Images To Your Blog Posts.

I’m thinking we need to be creative in these situations to also consider image generators, comic generators and photo editing tools for creating images. So can you please share student-safe tools that educators could use, other than Flickr, such as:

  • Other sources of creative commons images
  • Image Generators
  • Comic Generators
  • Online Photo Editors

Photo by by Za3tOoOr! licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic.

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31 thoughts on “Share Your Tips For Creating and/or Finding Images For Blog Posts

  1. Thank you all for generating this sterling collection! I’ve checked out a couple of the links posted here, and added them to an Image Banks list that I’m compiling for bloggers and digital storytellers. No doubt – the more sites I explore, the more good one’s I’ll find. Thanks again!

  2. And, by the way, I use it at home the most because I take my laptop with my presentations on it back and forth. Luckily Flickr is not blocked where I work.

  3. Thanks everyone for sharing your ideas for student-safe image tools that educators could use, other than Flickr. If you have managed to check out each others links please let me know your thoughts.

  4. There are some amazing sources of copyright-free, public domain, student-appropriate imagery! They are the Federal government agency websites! Think of a Federal agency like NASA. In reality, there are many programs under NASA, each with its own website and multimedia gallery. The media on these sites is in the public domain because the sites are funded by taxpayer dollars. All the images, video, and audio resources can be used by teachers and students for free – although it is a good practice to properly cite the source of the media.

    One way to find these agency websites is to go to http://www.usa.gov/
    which is the portal to all Federal agencies. However this portal isn’t the easiest way to find resources. Here are some governmental sites with great image collections:

    National Biological Information Infrastructure
    images.nbii.gov/

    National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
    http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/index.html

    NASA
    http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html

    Nasa Image Exchange
    nix.nasa.gov/

    U.S. Geological Survey
    http://www.usgs.gov/

    National Park Service
    http://www.nps.gov/

    National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery
    http://www.nsf.gov/news/mmg/

    U.S. Department of State Portraits and Stock Photographs
    http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/pix/amb/

    State Photo Galleries
    tinyurl.com/dbuvr

    For more image resources visit:

    http://www.djusd.k12.ca.us/technology/images.htm

  5. I saw one photography search engine with free photos from Flickr.
    Please check this link http://rotavacx.com

    It can help you more than most sites because it has some cool visual search tools. You’ll find what you need in seconds.

  6. Hi from Italy and thanks to the community of Edublogs for the many tips you give me everyday. I have some links to share and I’m happy to help:

    http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp
    the best, with beautiful pictures and a very good section regarding the educational policy, allowing students and teachers to download the images and use them in their works;

    http://images.com/
    many good pictures with a search engine to easily find and choose them

    http://www.imageafter.com/index.php
    very very good, with many options to search for the right picture, including a useful “color search engine”

    Hope it helps 🙂 Bye Sue

  7. http://www.school-clip-art.com/ has a range of images for children to use, as long as they provide a link to the site. It’s pretty hard to find what you want on this site though.
    More often than not we just take heaps of photos of everything we can and keep them in a file on the network which is accessible to children. Then they can choose a photo from there without copyright hassles.

  8. We use http://www.pics4learning.com/ here at our City Learning Centre in Sheffield (UK). However, like many of these ‘safe’ sites we have found that students can’t always find the images they want. I think there’s a real case for Flickr to develop an educational sister site with the creative commons search facility.

  9. @Talia, thank you so much for the website, I will definitely use it. I would do what Marsha said-downloading images myself- if I had younger students, but I have 7th and 8th graders and they need to know about copyright. I also found this one today, I don’t remember which website I was at that led me to it, but it has good photos that are free to use. It’s http://www.morguefile.com/, created by Michael Connors in memory of his parents, both special educators.

  10. Jakes and Shareskis’ session on Powerpoint today had good info on CC and understanding it, and you might find some tips there..,.Kristin Hokanson did a coveritlive, and it i supposed to have good info. I haven’t been to it myself. Plan to check it out. The sessionw as excellent though, and I was totally wrapped up in it w/o the need for a back channel.

  11. This is a concern within my district because we want kids to be safe and respect copyright….so difficult.

    I’m sure many of us already use this strategy, but in lieu of letting kids search…I’ve always downloaded a range of images, saved them to my jump drive and then uploaded them when I got to school. It’s rather cumbersome, but a good solution.

    Only drawback is that students don’t get any practice in keyword searching for their own images and they have to pick from the things I selected on their behalf. It is time efficient, though.

  12. I use this site: http://www.sxc.hu/index.phtml
    It has free stock art- really good for professional presentations, but great for kids as well. There’s a section where you can buy the pictures, but there are HEAPS of free ones. They just need to understand that they can only access some of them!!

    1. Your site, Talia, (called stock.xchng) has turned out to be the answer! Nice photos, both students and I have used it. Thank you. Since learning about copyright, my students are very grateful to those who share their images.

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