Free Photo Resources, Social Media, and Parent Teacher Conferences... in Education Today

Some interesting ideas I discovered recently about free photos, using social media in a school district, and improving parent teacher conferences...

People, Woman, Coffee... Meeting / Pexels / CC0 1.0

20 Free Stock Photo Resources
http://www.picmonkey.com/blog/free-stock-photos/
from the PicMonkey blog at http://www.picmonkey.com/blog/

PicMonkey--my favorite photo-editing tool--recently shared 20 Free Stock Photo Resources. Some of the sites you probably already know (Flickr, Pixabay, Unsplash, ...), but others are new (to me, at least).

• Albumarium

• Magdeleine

• Negative Space

• Pexels

• Free Food Photos

• KaboomPics

• and more

(Be sure to read the licensing notes.)

Social Media Explained (with Donuts) / Chris Lott / CC BY 2.0

4 Steps to Mastering Social Media
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2015/10/05/master-social-media-753/
from eSchool News at http://www.eschoolnews.com/

A school district superintendent shares how his district successfully uses social media to improve community engagement.

Read about the strategies he uses:

• Develop a plan

• Tell your story

• Encourage dialogue

• Avoid pitfalls

Parent Teacher Conference / Innovation_School / CC BY-NC 2.0

5 Resources for Parent-Teacher Conferences
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/parent-teacher-conference-resources-matt-davis
from Edutopia at http://www.edutopia.org/

Are you pleased with how your parent-teacher conferences went this Fall? Would you like to modify your approach a bit? Check out the resources gathered by Matt Davis at Edutopia.

The tips include ideas for principals, teachers, and parents. Topics include measuring student progress, questions parents should ask, conference forms, and much more. I think you may likely find some good ideas here.

Instructional Design and Digital Curriculum in Education Today... Black-and-White Photos and Photo Storage in Photography Today

Some interesting blog posts I have read recently about online courses (and blended learning) and photography...
 

"Addie-design" by Dave Braunschweig - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Addie-design.png#/media/File:Addie-design.png

Instructional Design...

Handy Checklist for Instructional Designers
KomiReddy Deepika
http://blog.commlabindia.com/elearning-design/checklist-for-instructional-designers

Do you use lists to help you organize your time and efforts? A list can help you to be efficient when you design online courses, too. Deepika's checklist has six parameters (with specific suggestions for each) to check when designing a course. The parameters include:

• learning objectives
• flow of content
• instructional strategy
• presentation
• assessments and feedback
• accessibility and navigation.

These are good reminders of what you should include when you create a course.

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Tips on Accelerating a Digital Curriculum in Your School Infographic
http://elearninginfographics.com/tips-accelerating-digital-curriculum-school-infographic/

The infographic in this article lists some best practices for implementing online programs. The basic ideas include:

• set goals for your digital curriculum
• bridge the "digital divide" with planning
• use digital content to shift students to active learning
• make your digital content easy for teachers to use and share
• use your digital curriculum to make time for the activities you value.

Each best practice lists specific ideas for that step. These suggestions work well for individual teachers as well as for schools and districts.


Find more education infographics on e-Learning Infographics

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B&W Trees / Phil and Jo Schiffbauer / CC BY 2.0

Photography...
Video Series: Black and White
http://www.picmonkey.com/blog/black-and-white-effects/
 
Black-and-white photos are not just... well... black and white when you use PicMonkey for photo-editing. You can use a color picker with the black-and-white setting to filter color. The daguerreotype setting allows you to work with black-and-white or sepia or what looks like a dark sepia. And a color picker is available there, too, for filtering colors. Plus both these options have fade controls.

PicMonkey provides short video tutorials for these effects and they are creating additional videos for other black-and-white effects.

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Olde Time / Jeff Hitchcock / CC BY 2.0

All-Time Greatest Album: the best way to manage your photos online in 2015
Casey Newton
http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/29/8467289/cloud-photo-storage-comparison-dropbox-icloud-flickr-onedrive-free

Casey Newton describes--and then charts the features of--eight photo storage services. He recommends which services work best for different types of photographers (average users and power users). He describes pros and cons for storage, auto-uploading, power, ease of use, value, and costs. The many comments at the end of this article discuss additional issues and provide useful insight.

Finding Appropriate Images for Blogs and Other Web-based Projects

#455572129 / gettyimages.com

A blog post is usually more interesting to read if images are included to illustrate the text. I'm frequently looking for sources for images to use in my blog, my class wikis, and other web-based projects. My interest in finding good photos is one of the reasons that I am doing my Project 365/2014 this year. In effect, I am creating my own folder of stock photography to use.

I still use many photos in addition to my own, however; so, I was impressed with Dan Leeman's resource on The EduBlogger blog. He has compiled The Ultimate Directory of Free Image Sources (http://theedublogger.com/2014/07/09/the-ultimate-directory-of-free-image-sources/). His criteria are subjects, high resolution, license, and safety. His categories are search engines, large crowdsourced collections, U.S. Government collections, unique collections, specific subjects, and clipart.

If you use photos to illustrate your writing, I recommend that you check out Dan Leeman's blog post.

Free Quality Photos are Available on the Web

This week (February 2, 2014) I am sharing several useful ideas and resources that I discovered through my PLN. The topics are:

• free photos you can use
• using color appropriately on a website
• facilitating online courses and
• an introductory video for mobile learning.

Each of the four topics is in an individual post.


Stock Photos That Don’t Suck: a list of places to find the best free stock photos
https://medium.com/p/62ae4bcbe01b
scroll down from the opening screen to see the list…
Ten sites are listed in this article. I have provided three examples below.


Little Visuals
http://littlevisuals.co/

I subscribed to the weekly images. “Use them [the photos] anyway you want,” states the author of the site. Currently, the site has been temporarily disabled due to too much traffic. However, individual photos are available on the site and can be downloaded one-by-one. The photos include many different subjects. The geometry teacher in me could not resist this one—Peace—from Germany.

Peace / Little Visuals  / CC0 1.0

Superfamous
http://superfamous.com/

Folkert Gorter's photographs are available free if you use the attribution license at his SuperFamous site. I found many scientific photos (especially geological). The photo I am posting here is tagged flowers; however, I did not find a title for the photograph.

Flowers / Folkert Gorter / CC BY 3.0

PicJumbo
http://picjumbo.com/

The photographs (of many topics) at this site are totally free for commercial and personal use. The example I have posted is that of a highway at night. I would give attribution to the website even though it is not required.

Highway at Night / Viktor Hanacek / PicJumbo

Go to Stock Photos That Don’t Suck: a list of places to find the best free stock photos to visit the other sites where you can find photos to use for free.

Do Your Attributions for Photos with Creative Commons Licenses Include TASL?

Photos with Creative Commons licenses are very helpful to illustrate information we want to share. All Creative Commons licenses require attribution. (Some Creative Commons licenses have additional requirements.) Do your students know what to include in an attribution?

The Creative Commons Wiki (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Main_Page) provides information that helps us write appropriate attributions. (See Best Practices for Marking Users at http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking/Users) Whatever format we use for our attributions we should include the title (if provided), author, source (usually the URL), and license (provide a link to it).

The wiki article on best practices shares an "ideal attribution" as well as some that are not so ideal. An easy way to remember what to include is the acronym TASL. So, examining the attribution on the photo I am using (see last photo in this column) for this post you will find:

1. title: Copyright License Choice
2. author: Open Source Way
3. source: the specific photo is linked to the title and the author's photostream is linked to the author's name
4. license: CC BY-SA 2.0 by the title of the license and linked to the license

That information is easy to find and--because you know what information to include--the attribution is fairly easy to write. There are, however, some ways to automate the attribution process.

ImageCodr.org helps you find Flickr images with Creative Commons licenses. It also provides the embed code to post the image and the attribution. See the example below.

  by  opensourceway 

Wylio.com also helps you search for Flickr images with Creative Commons licenses plus provides the embed code to post the image and the attribution. See the example below.

Compfight.com is another site that helps you to find Flickr images with Creative Commons licenses. This site helps you to download the photo and it provides an embed code for the attribution. See the example below.

Photo Credit: opensourceway via Compfight cc

I usually search for Flickr images via the Creative Commons site. I find embed codes so I can post the image and the attribution is not automated. Occasionally I download an image and post it rather than embed it. See the example below.

 

Copyright License Choice by Open Source Way / CC BY-SA 2.0

The techniques that we teach our students to use for attribution may vary based on the students' ages. However, I think it is important to keep the TASL acronym in mind. Using sites that automate the attribution process can make it easier for students to post appropriate attributions.

I have emphasized the acronym TASL to help us remember what to include in the attributions we write. The article about best practices in the wiki mentioned in this post provides additional information and examples of attribution formats. I think the article is very helpful.

[Thanks to TeachersFirst and to Richard Byrne of FreeTech4Teachers for information about ImageCodr.org and Wylio.com found when searching for Creative Commons and/or attribution on their sites.]

Preparing Photos for Use

I enjoy taking photos... and playing with them. I am slowly creating my own "stock photographs" that I can use in class and in my blog. That lessens those time-consuming searches for just the right photo... and making sure it has an appropriate Creative Commons license. I keep two folders for these stock photos. One folder is titled Stock Photos; the other, Cartoons and Comics. The contents of the first folder are just regular photos, some touched up a bit to make up for my errors when shooting the photo. The second folder has photos that have been modified to look like cartoons or comics using one of two apps, ToonCamera and Halftone.

Today I have been playing with a new app, Pxture. It takes text that you type and fills it with an image that you choose. Or it can put your text on top of a photo. How I use Pxture will determine which folder holds the photos I create.

Here's some samples:

Stock photo (camera):

Cartoon (ToonCamera):

Comic (Halftone):

Image-enhanced Text (Pxture):

Would these apps help you and your students to create and/or modify photos for use?


Photos used with permission of Jo Schiffbauer

How Are You Using Photos in Your Classroom?

Ohio Fall / Phil and Jo Schiffbauer / CC BY 3.0

What story could your students tell about these photos? There is an actual story; but that doesn't matter. What story could your students write?

Or what mathematics problems could they devise for these photos?

What science is illustrated in the photos?

After you and your students take a field trip they could create a collage like this and use it in their discussion of what they learned.

Perhaps, after a lesson your students could take pictures to illustrate what they learned and create collages to post in the classroom as reminders of what they know now.

Collages are very easy to create with PicMonkey, a free website that you can use for online photo-editing. (A paid premium membership is also available, but you can do a lot with the free version.)

• PicMonkey
• http://www.picmonkey.com/

• Tutorial: Make a Photo Collage
• http://blog.picmonkey.com/2012/10/16/learn-collage-before-another-butterfly-dies/

• All PicMonkey tutorials are available at...
• http://blog.picmonkey.com/category/tutorials/

Hmm... Perhaps, the way to scale up this activity is to use augmented reality with it.

By the way, this blog post began because I was looking for a way to manipulate photos that I have taken (rather than using someone else's photos). I thought I was going to use a website that I have used in the past. That website truly does some fun manipulations with photos. It used to do it for free. But not now. I have no problem with folks getting paid for their work, but I was looking for something free. So, then, I returned to exploring.

A reference to Picnik brought back good memories, but Picnik is no longer available as a standalone site. PicMonkey, however, has been doing a good job as its successor in online photo-editing. I use collages personally to capture events and to share them. The next step was obvious. Think about using collages in the classroom.

Of course, using photos at school includes using them in blogs and other multimedia reports. The collages don't have to have as many photos as the one I used in the blog. They can serve the purpose of a blog post or multimedia report with just a few photos.

So, I shall start using PicMonkey collages for teaching and learning in addition to using them for personal sharing. And next... I need to play with augmented reality!

How do you use photos in your classroom?

Creating My Own Stock Photos and Cartoons

When I began illustrating blog posts and other writings I used clip art. It was usually easy to find good free clip art and to give attribution to its website.  I eventually began to illustrate my writings with photos. Creative Commons has been very helpful with finding good photos that I can legally use and for which I can provide appropriate attribution.

I have used photos in my teaching for many years. When I taught geometry I used photos taken by my husband of local architecture, construction, and other examples of mathematics in the world around us. When I discovered a home near us that was basically a geodesic dome, we introduced ourselves to the owners and asked if we could take photos of their house for my classroom. They were very gracious and allowed us to do so.

In the last couple years I have begun to create my own "stock photos." I usually have a camera with me--either a point-and-shoot camera or a smartphone camera.  A couple of times I have tried to participate in one of the challenges to shoot and post one photo each day for a year. I haven't made it through a whole year yet. But as I thought about those challenges recently, I decided that in addition to helping you become a better photographer they also help you to develop your own collection of photos to use. Shortly after I came to that conclusion I read the same idea in one of the blogs that I follow. I'm sorry that I don't remember the name of that blogger. I would give him/her credit for coming up with that same idea I did!

     

 











In addition to normal photos I have been experimenting this summer with two apps, Halftone and ToonCamera. One gives a comic strip appearance to photos and the other, a cartoon effect. And this past week I played with Tagxedo, a word cloud browser application that has some nice features.

I still use Creative Commons and the occasional clip art websites, but I do enjoy using my own photos when possible and needing to state only "used with permission of Jo Schiffbauer."  :) 

Credits:
Writing clip art: http://www.phillipmartin.com/
Construction photo: CompuJeramey / CC BY 2.0
Muck farm photo: Used with permission of Jo Schiffbauer /
CC BY-NC 3.0
Blue (cat) enjoying Springtime: Halftone photo used with permission of Jo Schiffbauer /
CC BY-NC 3.0
Shrimp photo: ToonCamera photo used with permission of Jo Schiffbauer /
CC BY-NC 3.0
Cat PLN photo: Tagxedo word cloud used with permission of Jo Schiffbauer /
CC BY-NC 3.0