Thursday, February 13, 2014

Search Google for Creative Commons Images

In an effort to teach our students and model Digital Citizenship, Google has added a great feature to their search tools to help look for images under the Creative Commons copyright license.

Conduct a Google images search as you normally would.

Click on the Search Tools button to display the Size, Color, Type Time, Usage Rights, More Tools section

image search for dog









Now you can choose to search for images of a certain size or color, any type like photo or clip art, when the picture was uploaded, and just recently added, by usage rights.

Usage rights













Students can search for images that are filtered for reuse and reuse with modification.

Still a great idea to give credit when you can, list the URL the image came from (not www.google.com), and documentation that the image was used under a creative commons license.

If you are looking for other CC images to use for projects teachers can also turn to Flickr. Many images on Flickr are being uploaded for reuse and reuse with attribution. here are some search engines that will look through Flickr for you.
flickrCC
Compfight 
FlickrStorm 
Simple Flickr CC Search
Flickr Creative Commons Search

Image searches can still bring up inappropriate images for students. So be very careful about just turning students loose on an image search. 
One suggestion I have for teachers that ask how to stay safe on an image search is to gather a group of pictures together for a project and allow the student to choose from that group of pictures selected by you. It is easy enough these days to grab the image off of the Internet so it shouldn't take too long to gather a large group of images to use for student projects. 

No comments:

Post a Comment