I continue to encounter too many educators who remain blissfully unaware that they are encouraging their students to steal intellectual property. They mistakenly believe it’s ok to use any image returned by a basic Google search. In fact, unless the searcher goes to Google’s ‘Advanced Image Search’ settings and opts to search only for “images labeled for reuse”, most search results probably cannot be copied or reused legally. The reality is that if the author retains the copyright, as indicated by the symbol above, an image (or video or song) cannot be used without the express permission of the author.

Happily, there is more than enough material online that can be used legally because it has been licensed under the Creative Commons, symbolized by the circle containing ‘cc’. Many thousands of people, myself included, use this license for what they share online–images, videos, music, blog content, etc. For more information about the Creative Commons, please visit their website. [I've also embedded a short video about about Creative Commons at the bottom of this post.]

For several years, I have used the search engine Compfight that can be set to return only Creative Commons images when I want to find images to use in blog posts or presentations. Now I’ve discovered an alternative that I really like.

Photo Pin is an image search engine that returns images licensed under the Creative Commons. It is straightforward and extremely easy to use.

1. Enter a search term and click the ‘Search’ button.

2. Place your cursor on an image that interests you.

3. To view the entire image, click on ‘preview’.

3. If you wish to use the image, click on ‘get photo’. This will bring up the dialogue box shown below where you can choose the size of image you wish to download. You are also offered a link to the original image, as well as code that you can  copy and paste into a blog post or other website in order to credit the person who took the picture. I have illustrated this below the dialogue box.

photo credit: paulhami via photopin cc

fotopedia defines itself as a ‘collaborative photo encyclolpedia’.  At present, there are 44, 764 articles illustrated by 661, 750 photos.  Registration is free, and any registered member can create articles and/or nominate photos to illustrate articles.  Additional information is from Wikipedia and Google Maps.

The quality of images on fotopedia is excellent.  That’s because you can only nominate photos to illustrate articles.  An image must receive 5 votes of affirmation before being fully accepted for the article.  Photos can be uploaded from your computer, or imported directly from Flickr.

A desktop client (Mac and PC) is available to download so you can have fotopedia available on your computer’s desktop. You can also use a customizable widget to  embed slide-shows of fotopedia images.  I’ve illustrated this below with a slidewhow of the images that accompany the article on India.

It is paramount that teachers recognize and remember that most of their students do not learn in the same ways that they themselves learn. Simply trying harder doesn’t work if you learn differently!

I’m especially pleased when I discover new resources that put multiple means of representation together in one place!  Here’s one that gathers text, images, and videos into one place.  Of course, you can add an audio version of the text as well, with one of many readily available text-to-speech options.

Navify is a service that combines Wikipedia articles with related videos from Youtube and online images.  So, when a topic is entered into the search bar, it brings up the pertinent Wikipedia article along with videos and images on the same subject.  With the multiple means of representation offered, there is a far greater chance of engaging a wider range of learners.

The first screen shot below shows the Wikipedia article that opens when ‘tiger’ is typed into the search box.  You can see the tabs above the article for Images and Videos.  The second screen shot shows what appears when the Images tab is clicked, and the third shows the videos.

It should be noted that it is up to users to select the images and videos that are associated with an article.  For all of the search terms I entered, I was offered an extensive collection of images and videos to choose from.  Since Navify is a relatively new service, there were relatively few videos associated with any of the topics I searched.

Two other features of Navify are also worth mentioning.  The first is that users have the opportunity to comment on topics.  Secondly, related topics are suggested with search results.

Tag Galaxy is an application where folksonomy, Flickr, and creative three-dimensional presentation come together in a way that is highly effective.  The net result is an intuitive visual way to search for images on Flickr and to see the relationships between tags.

You enter a tag into a search box,  and that tag becomes a “sun”  that is orbited by a “galaxy” of related tags. The related tags are presented as planets orbiting the sun. If you wish to combine tags, you simply click on  an orbiting tag and create a new sun with its own galaxy of related tags.

Once you have the desired tag, or combination of tags, you click on the planet you’ve created to view a globe of related images, as shown in the screenshot below for the tags Himalayas and Nepal.  (This globe shows the first 235 of the 17,994 Flickr images tagged Himalayas and Nepal!) The globe can be tilted, rotated, and spun in any direction to find and select an image.

]]> http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2009/05/01/tag-galaxy-online-resource/feed/ 1 http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/09/27/arkive-education-exceptional-online-resource/ http://paulhami.edublogs.org/2008/09/27/arkive-education-exceptional-online-resource/#comments Sun, 28 Sep 2008 03:04:07 +0000 Paul Hamilton http://paulhami.edublogs.org/?p=941 Continue reading →]]> Visual learners require engaging images, but ALL learners benefit tremendously from engaging images and videos.  With the high quality photos and videos that are readily available on the internet, these are the best of times for learners everywhere.  The same holds true for educators intent on engaging learners.  The resource I’m highlighting today is an exceptional example of what is available.

ARKive Education describes itself as “…a free multi-media resource for teachers and educators.”  It is an extensive and well organized resource of extremely high quality.  Lesson modules, organized by targeted age level from 5 to 16+, cover a wide range of topics in science and social studies.

Each lesson module consists of an interactive PowerPoint file that contains supporting photos and video footage.  The modules download as zipped files which must be properly unzipped and saved to your computer in order to work properly.  In fact, I found the modules I sampled to function very slowly the first time through.  It was smooth sailing after that.

In addition to the lesson modules, Arkive Education offers a collection of engaging online games.  Have a look at the attractive welcome screen.  You’ll notice that there isn’t any advertising.

It is worth noting that Arkive Education is the “child” of ARKive, a website that houses literally thousands of  wildlife images and videos, with a special focus on threatened species.  Images have been carefully catalogued for easy searching. A great deal of additional information is also available about each species.  All movie clips and images on the ARKive website are free to download and use for internal educational purposes.