Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Britannica ImageQuest offers students, teachers, and schools access to a huge media library encompassing over 3 million rights-cleared images that can be used  to support teaching and to enhance students learning and engagement.

Unsplash is a great source of free high resolution images that you and your students can use in various school projects and art works. I am definitely adding it to this of the best free photo sources for teachers and students.

In today's post we are sharing with you three important websites where you can access tons of pre-made illustrations and icons to use in your media projects. These are illustrative materials you can use to make the content of your presentations, videos, infographics, and timelines more engaging. While most of these materials are offered under some sort of CC license, we recommend that you always check to make sure you are allowed to re-use them in your own educational projects.

Earlier this week the Smithsonian launched a new open access collection. Smithsonian Open Access contains more than 2.8 million digital artifacts that you can view and download for free. While the Smithsonian Open Access homepage does have a couple of introductory videos, they're more promotional than they are instructional.

Unsplash is one of my go-to recommendations for finding public domain pictures for classroom projects. Thanks to Rushton Hurley's latest Next Vista for Education newsletter I just learned that Unsplash now has an Unsplash for Education section.

Here are some free images for interactive scenarios. They go with the other free images I shared earlier. I use them for practice files in our e-learning workshops where we learn to build interactive, branched scenarios. They’re perfect for your scenario-based training and free to use.

The Library’s vast, international poster collection is featured in the latest “Free to Use and Reuse” image set. You’ll find much to enjoy from the 1890s through the 1960s among the posters, which promote travel, commercial products, war propaganda, entertainment, and more. We selected these posters in a special collaboration with Poster House, a new museum opening in New York City in 2019

The public beta of a new Creative Commons search tool, meant for testing and feedback. For the legacy search tool, please visit search.creativecommons.org.

Sourcera is an Add-on for Google Slides that lets you search for historical images and insert them directly into your slides. Sourcera pulls images from eleven sources including Flickr's Commons, the British Library, and the Digital Public Library of America.

  Tweet I recently wrote a guide for my library's blog on the best sites for high quality, free, and public domain images. I've recreated part of it below. These sites are hugely useful for marketing purposes, as you can use them in websites, posters, slides, on social media (but NOT insta! That nee

Flaticon's extension ' Icons for Slides and Docs' provides access to a treasure trove of visually appealing icons to integrate in your Google Slides, Google Docs, Google Forms, and Google Sheets. With a single click you can insert icons to reinforce your message and enhance your expressive abilities. The site hosts over 2 million high quality icons all of which can be customized to serve your own communicative needs. 

Unsplash is a great source of free high resolution images that you and your students can use in various school projects and art works. I am definitely adding it to this of the best free photo sources for teachers and students.

No matter how many public institutions you visit in a day—schools, libraries, museums, or the dreaded DMV—you may still feel like privatized services are closing in. And if you’re a fan of national parks and public lands, you’re keenly aware they’re at risk of being eaten up by developers and energy companies. The commons are shrinking, a tragic fact that is hardly inevitable but, as Matto Mildenberger argues at Scientific American, the result of some very narrow ideas.

Creative Commons Search is an excellent tool students can use to search for CC licensed images to use in their works. What this tool actually does is that it provides you access to a number of search engines that provide CC licensed content including Flickr, Pixabay, Google Images, Wikimedia Commons, and many more

Heads up: Creative Commons has officially launched CC Search, a search engine that indexes over 300 million images from 19 image collections, "including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and art works (Behance, DeviantArt), photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse." All of the indexed images are in the public domain and released under Creative Commons licenses--meaning the images are generally free to use in a non-commercial setting.

Head here to start searching.

Yesterday, people who subscribe to the Practical Ed Tech newsletter received a copy of my guide to finding copyright-friendly media for use in classroom projects. The guide includes explanations of Public Domain, Creative Commons, and Fair Use. In the section on using self-created media I included an example of how I unintentionally committed a copyright violation when making a screencast video a few years ago. 

All of us know that visual content can make an eLearning course more appealing for the learner. However, there are many things to consider when looking for appropriate images for your eLearning.

First and foremost, you want each image to support and add to the content of the particular slide – you definitely want to avoid the impression that images have been added for no other purpose than a pop of color. You also need to consider whether the image matches the theme and overall style of the course. For example, you might not want to introduce very bright and childish imagery into corporate training on identity theft.

If you’re a content creator, you already know that high-quality images make posts more enticing to readers. You’ll find plenty of open source images if you know where to look. The Internet is chock-full of digital images, but which ones are free to use? You can start with looking at the 15 Best Sites for Open Source Images. However, finding them is only the first step. You also need to know how to properly attribute them, and give credit to the image’s copyright holder. Let’s take a look at some of the best places to find open source images, and how to attribute them appropriately.