10 Fab Flickr Groups for Teachers
Tom Barrett yesterday tweeted a link to another excellent “Interesting Ways” presentation: 28 Interesting Images to use in the Classroom.
This got me thinking about one of my favourite sources of images, the Flickr website, and how many amazing images there are on there. Many of which are able to be used by teachers under a creative commons licence.
One of the great things about Flickr is the social aspect with Flickr groups. Anyone can set up a group on any topic, and people can add relevant images to those groups. Not suprisingly there are lots of groups with images that teachers would find interesting.
So, in addition to the wealth of groups devoted to places around the world, or groups of animals etc, here are some Flickr groups that teachers might find useful :
Atrocious Apostrophe’s – photographs of badly placed apostrophes on signs and other places. Good for “what’s wrong with this picture?” starters.
Bad Maths – dodgy special offers found in stores. Again could use as a “what’s wrong with this picture” starter activity.
In Numerical Order – numbers in the real world. Sequential – no repetition of numbers. Inspire children to find numbers around them.
Images to teach languages – signs in lots of different languages.
Geometric Beauty – lots of shapes for maths lessons
Fractals in Life – again good for looking at shapes and patterns for maths.
Classroom displays – ideas of good classroom displays. Get inspiration from others.
The Physics Classroom Flickr Group – images for physics teachers
Life Sciences Teaching Resource – images for biology teachers
Abstract Faces (and also Found Faces) – some of these would make great story starter images… use as characters etc.
If you have any favourite groups – add themto the comments below!
Enjoy!
Image Credit : Lisa Stevens (@lisibo)
Read MoreTop 100 Astronomy Images
The European Southern Observatory has just posted their Top 100 Images online. Science teachers should definitely check it out!
Each of the images is displayed as a taster thumbnail, and each links to a page with more information and larger versions of the image.
If you are looking for “wow” images to use in lessons, or just want some different desktop backgrounds, then go take a look: http://www.eso.org/public/images/archive/top100/
Read MoreBlitz Resources from History Pin
Seventy years ago this month the Blitz began. It started with the bombing of London for 76 consecutive nights, and soon cities and towns across Britain were suffering attacks, from Aberdeen to Coventry, from Birmingham to Hull.
Many homes, high streets and famous landmarks were dramatically altered by the bombings, in some cases beyond recognition. By the end of May 1941, more than a million homes had been destroyed or damaged in London alone.
HistoryPin has a selection of images of the Blitz, many superimposed over modern day streetview images of the area such as this image of bomb damage in Broadgate, Coventry. If you’ve not seen History Pin before, it is one of a series of projects created as part of We Are What We Do’s campaign to get generations talking more, sharing more and coming together more often. It’s an excellent resource bank, and still growing.
This would be a lovely resource for History teachers when teaching about World War 2. You can access the Blitz Collection here.
Bad Maths on Flickr
Inspired by a trip to Tescos recently where I saw this special offer, and by the Atrocious Apostrophe’s flickr group for all those instances of terrible punctuation, I decided to set up the Bad Maths Flickr group.
The aim is to collate any examples of bad maths out there in the real world. These images can then be used in maths lessons with students, getting them to spot the errors. It’s a fledgling group, but hopefully will grow.
If you’d like to submit any examples I’d love to have them in the group. Join here, and submit your flickr photos!
Read MoreVancouver 2010 Photographs
I love Canada, I love the Olympics, and I love The Big Picture website. So when you get all three combined, it’s just fantastic 
The Big Picture have produced 45 excellent photographs from week 1 of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.
Some of these would be excellent to use in Science lessons to illustrate forces and friction, but also obvious links to PE.
Some of this images are just awesome, would make great discussion points when displayed on the IWB. Go take a look. If you like those, here are some from the Opening Ceremony too.
Part 2 will follow next week after the closing ceremony. Update – They’re now up.
Only one British medal so far, but we’re not greedy
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 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 MoreStupeflix – Easy Video Slideshows
Stupeflix is a new site that lets you turn images into video slideshows in the same way that Animoto does. It’s currently in Beta and while you can create videos for free it looks like there may be a charge in future.
You can add images by copying and pasting the image URLs froma site such as Flickr, or by uploading images. You can’t (at present) pull images in from a Flickr photoset in the same way as Animoto can.
It’s very easy to group images into smaller sets – and add captions to an image or a group of images very quickly.
Unlike Animoto you have to upload your own mp3 music files – you can’t choose from a bank of creative-commons tunes. But it is easy to get songs from a site such as Jamendo and add a credit to your video. This would also be a good way of producing a podcast – adding images to go alongside an mp3 podcast file you had produced.
The video generation is pretty quick too. You can produce iPhone video, Quicktime or Flash video. Once produced you can download your video as a file – or view it online. I can’t see immediately how to embed this video into your blog directly from Stupeflix. You would need to download it and upload elsewhere to somewhere like Vimeo. This is a little silly, and I hope they provide embedding options in the future.
So here’s the quick video on Stupeflix I’ve produced. Only took about 10 mins or so to make. Direct link to the video is here.
Visualisers – a quick demo slideshow from Danny Nicholson on Vimeo.
Jose Picardo has produced a good guide to using Stupeflix for podcasting – you can view it here.
There is a bank of ready-made videos on there, taken from images on Wikipedia from the look of things. You can view them here, and if you have an account you can use them as the basis of your own video by remixing them.
Read MoreHelix Nebula
This is such an awesome photo, I just wanted to point you towards it. Certainly would provoke awe and wonder on the IWB. View the full version here.
More amazing space images from the ESO website here.
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