Miss T's Classroom.

For awhile I have been aware of how we are using photographs that we get from the web.  This is an important issue and I think we all need to understand it.  I read from time to time a blog Free Tech 4 Teachers,  it  has some great information.   Today  it had a post on free images, and I spoke to the class about who owns photos on the internet.  Then Edublogshad a post and linked to K. McCready’s post on the proper use of images.  Sometimes synchronicity like this means its time to get this fully understood by all of us, teacher and class.

First of all we can use some photographs with the full permission of the person who owns the photograph.  These are photographs from the public domain.  One such place is Image Base.  Another is Photo8.  We can also search for free clipart.  

I will put all the links there are in a special area in the blogroll area.  Give me a few days to do that!  Thanks to Larry Ferlazzo for a lot more sites to use.  He also points out that when doing a Google search we can set it to images that are allowed to be reused. This is called Advanced Image Search.  On the page that it goes to, there is a place that says ‘not filtered by license’, click on that and choose ‘labelled for reuse’.  I notice here you can choose the size of the photo which is useful when you are doing something that needs a certain size, like our book trailers.

Then there are photographs that give us a creative commons licence.   With these photographs we may use them, and we must also give the credit to the owner.  This is called attribution.  Flickr  is one such place where we may find photographs in this category.

Attribution:Image: ‘Phare de Dielette 3‘

There are other photographs that have full copyright and we can’t use them.  Someone has taken such a photo and possibly sold it as in a newspaper.  The newspaper owns the photograph and we do not have any right to the photograph.  We can’t use it.

As well there are the photographs that we take.  With these we can use in anyway that we choose.  They are ours.  Build up your supply.  Be creative!!