Spice up images with Big Huge Labs
If you’re bored with the usual images and want to add some special effects to your pictures, then check out Big Huge Labs.
This site provides hundreds of different filters than can be applied to your photos to add many different special effects.
You can give the site access to your Flickr or Facebook photo albums, or just upload images for it to work on.
For example – turn one of your images into a stamp.
Or a piece of pop art in the style of Andy Warhol
Or maybe turn it into a jigsaw (Sadly not an interactive jigsaw)
or a mosaic in the style of David Hockney
You can also create calendars, badges, magazine covers, movie posters and many more! One tool even lets you turn 6 images into a printable cube – this would be good to make dice for languages with different images on each face.
Go check out Big Huge Labs today!
Read MoreFlickr Poet – turn poems into pictures
Here’s a great little link I got from the PetaPixel photography blog this morning.
Flickr Poet is a quick way of turning a poem, sentence or chunk of random text into a sequence of Flickr photographs. FlickrPoet is part of Stories In Flight, an ongoing exploration of storytelling in the age of the Internet.
It would be nice if you could specify creative commons images perhaps and also produce a permalink (or a gallery) so you could share your creations. But if you are using IWB software you could use the camera tool to capture your creation and put it into your notebook file (or the good old Print Screen and Art Program like I did to create the image above)
Go try it out now : http://www.storiesinflight.com/flickrpoet/
Read MoreCreative Commons Image Sources for your IWB
You can’t beat a powerful image to add punch to your lesson. Whether you want something to put up to draw questions from the class or just to add extra emphasis to a presentation. I’ve written about this before – and linked to a few good sources of images such as The Big Picture.
To help find creative commons images, there are several tools now which will let you search Flickr for CC images. My Favourite is FlickrCC – enter a tag to search for and it will return a load thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail to see more information and to visit the original page on Flickr.
Other search engines which trawl Flickr include:
Compfight : http://www.compfight.com/
FlickrStorm : http://www.zoo-m.com/flickr-storm/
Simple Flickr CC Search : http://johnjohnston.info/flickrCC/index.php
Flickr Creative Commons Search : http://flickr.com/creativecommons/
Remember to credit the original source of the image when you use it. I usually copy and past the full URL to the source image – you could also give the Flickr user name.
If you can’t find the image on Flickr, it’s well worth checking again in the future. About 5000 images get uploaded to Flickr every minute, so there’s a chance something more suitable will be there next time you check.
Some other sources of images include:
Geograph : A project to take photographs of every map square in the UK. Useful for finding photos of your local environment. And if there’s not many there, would be a good idea for a project to take some! http://www.Geograph.org.uk
PhotoEverywhere : Photos from all around the world. http://photoeverywhere.co.uk/
E2Bn Gallery : A community resource made by the educational community for the educational community. Worth a look. http://gallery.nen.gov.uk/gallery-e2bn.html
Animal photos : Does what it says on the tin. Photos of animals. http://animalphotos.info/a/
The Open Clip Art Library : A good source of clip art resources. Registration required, but it’s free. http://openclipart.org/
You can also use the advanced image search feature of Google Image Search to get it to check for licences and only return images that are covered for reuse, or commercial use. Go to Image Search and look for the “advanced search” button. Or click here.
The creative commons website also lists a stack of other image sites here : but I haven’t checked them all out.
You can also use the search engine provided by Creative Commons.org : http://search.creativecommons.org/
You can also use the Wikimedia Commons, plenty of images there that are covered by a creative commons licence : http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Remember to check the licence of any image you want to use. On Flickr, it’s pretty obvious – look below the tag list and you should see “some rights reserved” or similar. Click on that link and it will tell you the licence that image is covered by.
Of course if you do use Flickr to host your own images, consider changing the licence so that others can use them under a share-alike licence too. You can do this for individual photos, or change the default settings for all your photos. It’s good to share!
I’ve also produced a printable guide to Creative Commons, and some sources of images and sounds.
A quick tip if you are doing an image seach live – on your IWB – in front of a class. Although you might be searching with the best of intentions – sometimes even the most innocuous search can throw up images that you may not want the students to see. Some search engines have a “safe search” filter, and the school filter may block them, but it’s always best to cover yourself just in case. Check your Projector remote for a Blank or a Freeze button (most should have at least one or the other) and freeze/blank the screen while you do the search on the computer. You can see the search on the regular monitor and check that nothing untoward is being displayed.
Happy searching!
Read MorePowerful Images to Give Lessons Punch
One of the benefits of having an Interactive Whiteboard in the classroom (or even just a data projector) is the opportunity to display full colour high quality images instead of grainy acetates or posters. With a powerful image you can really add some “punch” to your lesson. Put images up while students are coming into the room – use them as part of a lesson starter – stimulate questions.
What is going on here? Why is the astronaut wearing that suit? Why is it white? What would happen if he/she wasn’t on that robotic arm? What do you think it would be like to be up there? What do you think he is thinking? Should we be sending people into space? What is keeping him up there? What do we mean by Orbit? etc etc.
The Big Picture
One of my favourite sites for these kind of inspirational images is The Big Picture from the Boston Times. Every few days they post another set of images which never fail to make me go “wow”.
Here is just a selection of the great images that you could use in different curriculum areas:
For Science; Mercury Images, Robots, Hubble Images, International Space Station, Earth and Environment, Animals, Zoos, Swine Flu.
For Citizenship powerful images of the protests in Iran, and here. Also Life in Iraq,
For Geography – images of Cyclones, Earth Observed, Hurricanes from Above, Hurricane Ike
For RE – Carnival, Easter, Holy Week, Hindu festival of colours, The Haaj, Christmas,
For Art – La Princesse, Festival of Lights,
For Literacy – any and all of them could have a role in stimulating story writing, or class discussion on different topics.
And there are many more, plus its growing every week.
In a similar vein, The BBC website also has an “In Pictures” section which covers events in the news. As does The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian. All worth bookmarking and checking from time to time.
Remember to attribute the source of these images when you use them in your lessons. These are still the copyright of the photographer so you need to be careful how you use and distribute these images.
Flickr
For those of you who are into photography – Flickr is the YouTube of photographs. Several thousand photos get uploaded to Flickr every minute. The quality can be patchy, but there are thousands of excellent photographers sharing their works on Flickr. (and a few dodgy photographers, like me!)
What makes Flickr useful is the ability to add a Creative Commons licence to your images which says how they can be used. Many people allow their photos to be used anywhere, as long as you attribute them as the source of the image. Many will also let their images be used commercially in this way as well. In my presentations I now use a lot of images from Flickr and always link the image back to its original Flickr page by way of acknowledging the photographer.
Flickr also has an area for Public Photo Collections which you can search here.
To help find creative commons images, there are several tools now which will let you search Flickr for CC images. My Favourite is FlickrCC- enter a tag to search for and it will return 36 thumbnails. Click on a thumbnail to see more information and to visit the original page on Flickr.Other tools include; Compfight, Flickr Storm, and Simple Flickr CC Search.
The Creative Commons website now also provides a CC search engine for images and other resources as well as listings of tonnes of CC Image sites.
If you want to know more about Creative Commons, I have written a short guide which you can read on Scribd.
E2BN Gallery
Another useful gallery is the E2BN Educational Gallery of images. It’s not anywhere near as comprehensive as Flickr, but some schools may block access to Flickr since there are adult images on there.
Google Image Search
It would be wrong to talk about image searching without mentioning the Google Image search, which I use quite a lot. The drawback of the images it produces is that on the whole they are usually copyrighted images, or that the copyright of the image is unclear. This makes them tricky to use in educational resources that you want to redistribute.
A new addition to the Google Search is the ability to select the colour you are looking for. So instead of just looking for Flowers, you can look for only red flowers… It’s a neat addition.
In summary, there is a wealth of image sources on the Internet that you can use to provide punch to your lessons.
Remember to not to choose images that are too small, or that look blocky when stretched to full screen. Test them out before the lesson to make sure they look OK. Show them as big as you can for maximum impact. Think about how you want to use them – what questions could you ask to stimulate your students thinking processes?
For example, as a leaving thought – How could you use this image? What does this say to you?
Update – Found this great blog post with a few more images sources: 7 Awesome Newspaper Photoblogs.
Read MoreLink Roundup
One of those posts with links that I didn’t feel warranted a blog post of their own. Have a play with them and see what you think!
Spell with Flickr – for those times you want a word to look really funky and you’ve exhausted all the fonts. This pulls in photos of letters from flickr to make your word. Embed into your blog or use a capture tool to grab the image to use in a flipchart.
Phrasr - Type a phrase and the site will pull in words from Flickr to match each word and then animates them in sequence. You can save them, and link to old ones via the archive. Here’s an example.
Bookr is from the same people who produced Phrasr. It lets you use flickr photos to make picture books which you can publish or share. A nice tool for literacy.
Another version of the Fridge Magnet Poetry idea can be found here. Looks like a shared space so you can create poems with others.
Elastoplast have produced a website that lets you create stories using characters built from plasters (band-aids). You can have 6 frames, select static or animated characters, draw on each frame, and add your own text desciption. Stories can be saved to their archive. A different way to do digital storytelling, as long as you don’t mind the obvious product placement! Write your stories here!
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