I wrote this yesterday, but struggled to get it online from my mid-Wales hotel. I’m going to post it now, and add the images tomorrow!
There are few things that annoy me more than an image in a teacher-created resource with a big watermarked copyright sign in the middle of it. We (quite rightly) pick up attempts by our students to plagiarise other people’s work, but in the closed nature of schools, and with the ease of access to Google images, teachers either don’t know or don’t care that they are committing exactly the same offense.
It’s never been easier to find images that you can legally use. Here’s a few ways:
Through Hwb
If you’re a teacher in a school in Wales you can log in to Hwb, click ‘Resources’ and choose to search ‘Image Quest’ – this is the image library from Encyclopaedia Britannica and you have access to these images for use in your lessons and resources (as do your students)
Flickr – Flickr.com
You can search for ‘Creative Commons’ images in Flickr, which include images uploaded by many museums, libraries and archives around the world.
Wikimedia Commons – commons.wikimedia.org
All the images on Wikipedia (and many others) are gathered together in the Wikimedia Commons library. Just like the articles on Wikipedia everything here is licensed for reuse
Google
Even Google itself lets you filter the image search for images that it believes are licences for reuse. From an image search click search tools > usage rights> and select one of the options (I tend to just go for ‘licensed for reuse).
This can be frustrating as the image that caught your eye may well disappear once you apply the filter of images only licences for reuse. You can add the filter before you search, although Google haven’t really made it that easy – from the Google Images home page choose ‘settings’ in the bottom right of the screen and then select ‘advanced search’. The final option in the second block (narrow your search by…) is license.
(As an aside, while you’re at it you can filter just large images to make sure they don’t break up when you fill your powerpoint slides with them…)
And there’s more.
A quick search for ‘Creative Commons Images’ brought up a number of other libraries that look promising including:
https://search.creativecommons.org/
http://photopin.com/
http://www.budgetstockphoto.com/creative_commons_images.html
(This last one contains a good overview of what ‘Creative Commons’ is any how it’s different to Copyright)
As you can see, there really is no excuse for those pixelated, watermarked, obviously copyright images in resources anymore!