Using Images for Educational Purposes ~ The Right Way!

The Internet has created a place for students to go and get almost unlimited information and images for use in schools and at home. With this comes the responsibility to use the Internet properly. This week I showed the students a website (www.pics4learning.com) where they could download pictures, for educational use only, and use them without asking permission first. We still have to acknowledge the owner of the photos and give credit where credit is due, but we don't have to seek out permission before using them.

Google is a great place to find images of people, places, and things but this isn't always our best choice for finding images that we can just use, even if only for a report, presentation or other project. However, there is a way to safely borrow images. It takes a couple of steps to get there so I am posting the instructions for students to follow.

First, do a Google Image search for your chosen topic. I chose Donald Driver!

You'll notice that there are a TON of images to choose from...but sadly, we cannot just pick any image from the Internet and just use it. So, our next step is to go to the tool bar near the top of the page and click on "Search Tools".

From here, we get a drop down tool bar where we need to choose "Usage rights" in order to get images that are "legal" for us to use.

Choose "Labeled for noncommercial reuse":

And voilá! We have copyright-friendly images! Now these may not be the "best" pictures the students are looking for, nor can we use them to create items to sell for a profit (or even to give away!) but they will be useful when creating education-related projects and presentations. Again, always give credit where credit is due!

As always, students need to make sure they are choosing safe images and should always report to an adult when they see something that makes them uncomfortable.

Finally, if students are unable to find images online that are acceptable for them to use, they can always try to reach out to the owner of the images they want to use. I did this with a student last year and the owner gladly gave us permission to use his images! Contact me directly if you'd like assistance with this!

Have a fantastic weekend!