digitalgoonies.com

www.compfight.com

OK, Flickr is one of our favorite sites simply because the number of images that are available, tagged, described, and shared. We highly recommend Flickr’s Creative Commons section for educators and students. If you don’t know about Creative Commons or have just had a case of amnesia, be sure to check out our previous post about finding copyright friendly images.

One of the down sides of Flickr is that it’s not the easiest interface to navigate and search for images. Enter today’s web application- Compfight. Seriously, I’m not sold on the name (was that compfight or compflight, Susan?). It’s supposed to have something to do with finding “comps” (comparable images) for your project or whatever. Anyway, just enter a search term and select whether or not you want to look only in the Creative Commons of Flickr and whether or not you want the safe search turned on. Here’s my search for dolphin:

For most of the thumbnail images you can simply hover your mouse over the image and it will give you the size of the available image (in pixels). Click on a thumbnail to open the Flickr page where the original can be downloaded.

It’s easy, it’s free, it’s fun!

http://www.openclipart.org/

Finally! A great source for free, that’s right, free clip art! The Microsoft Clip Art gallery is OK at best- and that only suffices for your Office documents. But if you, like most educators, are in need of other clip art that you are free to use without worrying about violating copyright, then this site is for you! The site currently features over 30,000 pieces of searchable and browsable clip art graphics. Every one of these graphics are in the public domain, having been put there by the authors/designers. Here are a few examples (images that remind me of summer):

Each of the graphics can be downloaded in either the SVG format or the PNG format. For those of you unfamiliar with SVG, it stands for scalable vector graphics. If you don’t know the difference between a vector and a bitmapped/raster graphic, you should click here to find out more about these. Essentially, vector graphics can be scaled to any size without any loss of quality since they are drawn on your screen according to mathematical algorithms.

So there you have it- another great free resource for your projects.

www.pdphoto.org

PD Photo.org is a great site for finding images that are copyright friendly for both teachers and students. It is a database for free, public domain photos. There are a few exceptions on this site, so you have to read the fine print below the image.

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www.pics4learning.com

A few weeks ago when I wrote a post about getting images from Flickr, I mentioned Pics4Learning which is another of my favorite places to send students to find images. Pics4Learning is a free service offered by Tech4Learning. Pics4Learning is a copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students. There are thousands of images in the image library, which have been contributed by teachers, students, and other amateur photographers. The owner still retains copyright, but has given permission for the image to be used by both teachers and students for educational purposes. My favorite part is that each image has a citation given so that students can copy and paste into their projects.
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www.flickr.com

Finding images for teachers and kids to use for projects that stay within fair use/copyright laws can be tough. The internet is a wealth of great images, but copyright restricts the use of an awful lot of them. There are always paid sites for clipart and images, but that requires money! That’s why I alway try to find FREE images whenever possible. Continue reading