PDF 
Problem! 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.
If you are enjoying reading this blog, please consider 
Subscribing For Free!
Edublogs Support Manager @suewaters on Twitter
I’ve used the following comic generators successfully in classes over the past few years:
http://www.makebeliefscomix.com
http://www.kerpoof.com
In fact, Kerpoof has been so popular that the children have gone home, created lots of cartoons / movies and emailed links to the class email, so that they can share their work outside of the classroom with their peers in school.
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!!
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Hi Sue
A very good site to find images with CC licences is Photoree: http://www.photoree.com/photos/start. It’s a collaborative image recommendation system.
Excellent info on copyright and using images (photo and movies), books, maps and music is provided by Public Domain Sherpa. Their image information is at http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/public-domain-photographs.html.
I use a CC search on Flickr. There are quite a few sites out there that will do the search for you. I use http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net
Another I have heard to be good, but haven’t used myself is FlickrStorm – http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
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.
WOW this is really helpful stuff
thanks Sue
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!
Thanks again everyone for sharing your links as @Viper and @Paul point out this list makes the task so much easier for everyone.
I have compiled a “few” sites for images here:
http://collaborationnation.wikispaces.com/Photos
Sue–since you moderate comments…can you fix my spelling error in the last comment!
heyy;\]
whats upp
HI I LIKE MAKING NEW FRIEND SO TRY TO FIND OUT WHO I AM!
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Hi Sue,
so everything is going wonderfully well with my blogs I find I can do almost all the things the kids ask ,however, just recently no matter what I do I cannot add images…and yes I have added images a ton of times but for some reason this feature has decided to go “DOO dally tapped” on me!
I have tried everything including using other browsers but to no avail so can you help?
yours gratefully
Silvana
@Mrs Cunningham sent you an email with suggestions to try.
well done; then