Here is my
on-line handout for the ICT training session that I ran at Musselburgh Grammar School
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.
Thanks this is perfect.
Posted by: Lynne Lewis | November 26, 2006 at 09:06 PM
No problem Lynne - A screen cast is on the way. Just waiting for Google video to approve it. have a good week! Ollie
Posted by: OllieBray | November 26, 2006 at 09:09 PM
A brilliant resource, Ollie. I have forwarded the link to our teachers; many of whom are genuinely interested in this.
Posted by: David Noble | November 27, 2006 at 11:40 AM
Great - thanks for this Ollie!
Posted by: Rob Chambers | November 27, 2006 at 07:32 PM
Great - thanks for this Ollie!
Posted by: Rob Chambers | November 27, 2006 at 07:32 PM
Hi Rob and Dave, Thanks for your comments, glad you like the post. Ollie
Posted by: OllieBray | November 27, 2006 at 10:33 PM
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.
Posted by: Mark Tennant | November 29, 2006 at 06:16 PM