IMAGES IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

When students are creating presentations, they often use Google Images to find pictures without the understanding that many of these are copyrighted. If they use these images, not only are they breaking copyright laws but are guilty of plagiarism as well. It may be easy to justify it as simply a school assignment but we are doing a huge disservice if we don’t teach students, even in grade school, the proper way to access and use digital sources online...even images.

Luckily, there are many different places where a person can find images in the public domain. It is still important to properly cite where the images come from but there are no copyright violations to worry about. Here are two of my favorite sites to use:

Unsplash: There are currently over 1.5 million photos available but the best feature is the collections making it easier to find exactly what you need.

Pixabay: There are currently over 1.1 million photos available to download and use from this site for free. One small warning though is it will often display pictures from a paid service first which can confuse some students.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using AI to find resources

  Earlier this past week, I was asked by Mr. Morris to find resources for his class over Ancient Africa. The first place I started was not with a Google search. Instead, I turned to ChatGPT . My first query was pretty straightforward. I simply stated I wanted 6th grade resources for Ancient Africa. It did provide some links to a few websites but it was pretty underwhelming. I tried a few more queries before I decided to try the search with Perplexity AI . Not only did Perplexity show six different websites to use but it broke it down better than ChatGPT. In fact, it recommended a new search query under Related that showed some activities I could use as well. Finally, I tried the Bard AI (I had to use my personal G account to access Bard). I found the results on Bard to be pretty much the same as on ChatGPT. Just goes to show why I like Perplexity AI so much! For more information on AI tools teachers need to be aware of, take a look at Matt Miller’s article titled 30 AI tools for t...
Read more

Mathigon/Polypad

  What is it? Mathigon/Polypad is an interactive learning platform designed for mathematics. “ A completely new content format, combined with an innovative new curriculum, makes learning more personalized and fun than ever before: we call it the “Textbook of the Future”. Highly interactive content allows students to actively “explore and discover.” How much does it cost? It is free and students don’t have to sign in to use Polypad IF they don’t want to save their work. They can go to the site, explore, and visualize how math works. Want to know more? Watch this short video for a quick overview. Alice Keehler has a blog post in which she talks about how she uses Polypad to help her students visualize fractions including a video of her elementary age son using the program. You can access it here.
Read more

QuestionWell AI

  I first learned about QuestionWell from a blog post by Richard Byrne. You can locate that post here .  What is it? QuestionWell is an AI tool developed to help teachers create reading comprehension and guided questions over a topic, a large chunk of text or an online article. The questions can then be saved to a Word document or saved to one of the popular quiz apps such as Kahoot or Blooket.  Educational Uses? I found this AI tool to be incredibly easy and useful. The prompt I used was simply to ask it to generate questions about emerging technology for 9th grade students. I did not enter any text or even a link to an article found online. With only the bare minimum, it was still able to generate 6 essential questions and 19 general questions. I love the ability to filter the questions by learning objectives. I appreciated the ability to easily select all of the questions or only the select few I needed. I then tried the same AI tool using a link to a news article...
Read more