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.

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.

When looking for public domain and Creative Commons licensed images to use in multimedia projects I generally recommend going to sites like Unsplash, Pixabay, and Photos for Class instead of Google Images (my full list of recommendations is available here). The reason for that recommendation is that in the past Google Images hasn't been terribly clear about image licensing even when the "labeled for re-use" filter has been applied to image search results. Fortunately, Google is taking some steps to change that.

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.

Mixkit is a website that offers hundreds of free music files and videos that you can download to use in your multimedia projects. The licensing terms for assets on Mixkit are clear. You can download videos and audio files from Mixkit to re-use and remix. You don't have to credit Mixkit, but they will appreciate it if you do.

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.

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.

Historical photographs, paintings, sketches, and maps can inspire all kinds of history questions. That is why for more than a decade I’ve used and recommended images from Today’s Document from the National Archives to prompt classroom discussion as the introduction to U.S. and World History lessons. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of other similar galleries on the web today. A list of some of my favorites is included below.
.

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.

The Centre for Ageing Better has created a small library of freely-usable (under CC) photos which show more realistic and positive images of older people. Avoiding ageist stereotyping in images of older people is one of the aspects of Age-Friendly Media and Information Literacy #AFMIL that Bill Johnston and I have identified. As the Centre for Ageing Better notes "images of wrinkly hands clasped together in consternation is an all too common sight" and they also urge people to avoid images that emphasise frailty "sad eyes, beige sofas etc."

Looking for some good places where students can access public domain and free images? The collection below has you covered. This is a curated list of some useful websites that provide free photos.

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.

Unsplash is one of my top recommendations for places to find images that are in the public domain. Last August Unsplash introduced collections intended for educational uses. This week Unsplash added more collections that have great potential for classroom uses.

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.

A collection of emerging tools just right for humanizing your online course.

Peruse the buffet, click on the links, and sample what looks intriguing and helpful to you!

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.

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.