Using and finding images in the Classroom: online handout

Here is my on-line handout for the ICT training session that I ran at Musselburgh Grammar School on the 22^nd November 2006. The title of the presentation was Using and finding images in the Classroom.

Introduction

One of the first questions that often gets asked is ‘where can I find good pictures on the Internet?’. There are a number of web sites that can help you do this.

Scran

Scran is a learning resource base and toolset with 336,500 images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media. All Scottish teachers have free access to scran and you are able to use the images within it for education a purposes.

Google Image Search

Most people use Google or Yahoo to search for images. There is nothing wrong with this, but the images are often low quality and not copyright free. However with both Yahoo and Google Search engines it is possible to do a high resolution image search. For Google you need to select the advanced search link (shown below).

When you get into the advanced search menu. Select ‘large’ from the ‘return images that are’ menu.

The advanced image search function is important to not only allow high quality images to be collected by teachers for their classroom presentations. But also, as teachers, we should be training pupils to search for high quality images for their own presentations and projects.

Flickr

Flickr is a free photo sharing web site. You can up-load your own images to the site when you register or just browse the images of others. It’s a free service, but at Musselburgh we pay for the professional service, this basically means we can up-load more photographs per month. David Warlick has produced an excellent handout on how to up-load photographs to flickr.

The great thing about Flickr is that most photographs can be used for educational or non-profit purposes. Look for the type of Creative Commons licence for each photo when you access the site. If it says ‘some rights reserved’ you are normally OK to use a photograph as long as you give the photographer credit (this is common courtesy anyway). The copyright notice is on the right hand column of each photograph screen.

You can also add notes to Flickr photos. Click here for an example of how I have added notes to this picture of a Corrie taken by Paul Kenedy. Two other great examples of this technology being used are Tom Barretts use of flickr notes used to re-cap the main parts of the story from the novel ‘Goodnight Mr Tom’ and Neil Wintons use of Flickr in Home Economics.

If you have set up your own blog you can also get a Flickr Badge for your site. I have one on the right hand side of my blog. Whenever I up-load my photos to my flickr account they automatically up-date on the side bar of my blog. You can find out how to do this here. You can even get your flickr photos to appear in a spinning cube. Have a look at the Musselburgh Grammar Schools Craft and Design Department website to see an example.

Flickr can also do lots of other exciting things. These have been summarised beautifully by Alan Levin (of Cog Dog Blog) in his recent K12 online Conference Presentation. Click on the photograph below to see a flickr picture that has had notes added to it to show all the other uses for Flickr.

Bubbleshare

Bubbleshare is another great tool you can add fun things to photographs like speech bubbles and hats. You can also use it to make slide shows and add audio. Check it out and have a play around.

Other web tools for showing images

There are lots of other web tools available that can be used with classes to improve teaching and learning. One good website is Photobucket. This site allows you to turn your photographs into flash animations. Tess Watson has a good example photos using photobucket over on her blog – just scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the animation.

Another good website is scrapblog. It’s a good way of importing your flickr photos into an on-line scrapbook. I’m sure this would be popular with younger age groups or to be used to create an on-line yearbook.

The BBC News page also has a web page called ‘The week in pictures’ this is quite a nice way to start or finish a lesson.

Image generators

There are also lots of image generators out on the web. Check out the Generator Blog for a comprehensive list. Generators, such as the wave generator example that I used in the presentation can be used in innovative ways. For example, consider using an image generator to share your learning intentions with a class at the start of the lesson. This is a lot more exciting than writing three quick bullet points on a whiteboard.

Two other examples that I showed in the talk were the motivational poster generator and the magazine cover creator. You can find both generators over on BigHugeLabs. com

Finally

There are lots of other cool tools out there on the web. If you found this on-line handout helpful or if you have any other ideas or examples of good classroom practice using images leave comment, send me an email or drop me a skype call.

Comments

[Lynne Lewis]

Thanks this is perfect.

[OllieBray]

No problem Lynne - A screen cast is on the way. Just waiting for Google video to approve it. have a good week! Ollie

[David Noble]

A brilliant resource, Ollie. I have forwarded the link to our teachers; many of whom are genuinely interested in this.

[Rob Chambers]

Great - thanks for this Ollie!

[Rob Chambers]

Great - thanks for this Ollie!

[OllieBray]

Hi Rob and Dave, Thanks for your comments, glad you like the post. Ollie

[Mark Tennant]

Great work Ollie - have added a link on my blog. Glad to see the CPD sessions are going well so far. Will hopefully get some time to watch the screencast too and make the folks at DGS aware of it.