Web-ulous tools, part 3

Every couple of years, I share my favorite online tools, as I did in November 2017 and March 2014.

In this post, I am going to concentrate on tools to support Creative Commons image usage. I am not specifically going to cover the process of searching for CC images , but how to make sure attribution is included when these images are used.

Before I begin, I want to mention the use of watermarked images. Images are watermarked by the creator or site to showcase the image and offer a copy for sale without the watermark.

As educators, we need to model appropriate image usage, and should not use a watermarked image in anything we publish online or share with students. A discussion of watermarked images should be had with students so they understand both why items are watermarked and learn how to take the steps to watermark their own images if they desire to keep them from being “borrowed”.

Photos for Class

One great online site that solves the attribution problem for students is Photos For Class. This site allows student to conduct a search of Creative Commons-licensed images, receive the results, and download an image with an embedded citation/attribution included right on the image!

Although this is a great place to search for images and makes it easy for students to include attribution, educators should be aware there are some images that are not included in the results from Photos for Class. Below is the information on which Creative Commons licenses Photos for Class return results for and which ones they do not.

The Photos for Class search does not return photos that do not allow derivatives, of which there are many. In addition, they eliminate the “share alike” images which require the user, if they edit the image, to license their new image with the same license as the original creator assigned to their image.

Adobe Spark Tools

The Adobe Spark tools, Spark Video and Spark Page, have an image search engine built into the interface.

Free photos search in Adobe Spark Video

These searches, as per Adobe’s site, state that…

Spark searches Flickr for Creative Commons images and Pixabay for images tagged as public domain. Icons are retrieved from The Noun Project. When you search for images and icons, we’ll automatically add the credits at the end of every Video or Page.

The automatic attribution on the credits page is also great for students, as you can see below!

Automatic credit for CC-licensed image used in Adobe “Free photos” search

Adobe also states their searches only return Creative Commons-licensed images for images that are licensed as “commercial use with modification”. However, they remind the user to check the original image to verify the license.

With the return of images that are CC-licensed to use commercially, the pool of images located in the Adobe Spark tools “free images” search is probably smaller than the Photos for Class image search results, since it is more likely creators will allow their items to be used non-commercially than used commercially.

Keeping track of URLs

Of course, students can use use the image searches in Google Images, Flickr, or Bing to find their CC-licensed images. Do they want to edit an image? Do they need to use an image commercially? Or will an image be fine “as is” with attribution? Each of these search tools easily allows student to limit their search to a specific Creative Commons license, based on their need.

The thing to remind students to do is to save the URL of the image once they locate it. The full citation can be created at a later time, but it is important students can get back to the image itself to cite it properly.

Here are a few suggestions on methods to do this.

• Have students keep track of the original URLs and brief description of the photos in a Word, Doc, or Pages document.
• Have students use a page in Microsoft OneNote, in the app or on the computer, and add the URL and a small version of the image once they find it.
• Have students create a Keynote, Google Slides, or PowerPoint presentation with blank slides, upload the image to the slide and add the URL to the slide, too. When they are done collecting images, students can export the presentation as images or jpegs. The URL and/or full citations now always stays with the images!
• The teacher or students can create a Google Form template which includes the components of a Creative Commons image citation and students can save their information in a Google Sheet.
• Students can create a Padlet page to store thumbnails of the photos When they add the URL to the link button, the photos shows up on the Padlet wall. When they click on the image, students can open a new window and be sent directly to the original photo page, which, in the images below would be the Flickr page.

Citing Creative Commons images

The Creative Commons site provides guidance in how to cite an image. Foran image I took of my home, a geodesic dome…

…the attribution would look like this.

“Geodesic dome home” by Kathy Schrock is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Title of image/video [linked to original image] by Author [linked to profile page] under License [linked to license description page].

If students were not live-linking the citation, it might look something like this (which covers TASL- title, attribution, source, and license).

“Geodesic dome home” by Kathy Schrock (http://flickr.com/photos/kathyschrock) at https://www.flickr.com/photos/kathyschrock/7491208600/. Creative Commons licensed under an Attribution-NoDerivs Generic 2.0 license.

Feedback

Do you have some tips and tricks to help students easily provide attribution for Creative Commons images? Please share your thoughts on Twitter! #kathyschrock

Finding and citing online images

I am passionate about students using online tools and standalone apps to create. I truly believe creation allows students to showcase how they have turned the content into their own knowledge. Many of these tools require the use of images for creation of the product. These images can be photos taken by the student, drawings done by the student, or images found in online collections.

It is important for students to realize which online images they have permission to use and how to give credit to the creator. Here are some links, tips, and tricks to help make this easy for them!

SITES WITH FREE IMAGES

There are many sites that have free images and allow users to download, edit, and use the images without any attribution to the creator.

Pixabay, which includes photos, illustrations, and vector graphics, allows users to “copy, modify, distribute, and use the images, even for commercial purposes, all without asking for permission or giving credits to the artist.”

Flickr: The Commons is made of images shared by member institutions that have “no known copyright restriction.” The items may be in the public domain or owned by the institution itself, which is not claiming the copyright on the images. One tip: don’t have students search in the Flickr search box at the top of the page. Look down the page for “The Commons” search box.

The Flickr group, Internet Archive Book Images, is a collection of over 5.2 million historical photos and images from the books in the Internet Archive. Each image carries a “no known copyright restriction” license, so can be used for any purpose and edited. There is no requirement to cite the images, but enough information is included in the description to do so.

SITES WITH FREE IMAGES THAT REQUIRE ATTRIBUTION

Pics4Learning is targeted to student and teacher use of images and includes curriculum-related items that can be used for projects, on the Web, and in portfolios. The collection is comprised of user-contributed images. Images all include this usage information- “This image may be used by teachers and students in school and classroom activities for the express purpose of improving student educational opportunities. The photographer retains the copyright to this image.” Each image includes the full text citation for the image. I could not find this expressly stated on the site, but I am assuming, if the photographer holds the copyright to the image, the images should not be edited without the permission of the creator.

OpenPhoto is a collection of images primarily for artists, developers, students and teachers. The photographers freely license the images and the attribution code is included.

Wikimedia Commons includes millions of free images, sounds, and videos to use. The usage page states: “Everyone is allowed to copy, use and modify any files here freely as long as they follow the terms specified by the author; this often means crediting the source and author(s) appropriately and releasing copies/improvements under the same freedom to others.” What is great about this collection is that it can be searched in many different languages, making it a tool that can be used effectively by all learners.

FINDING FREE 360° IMAGES

With the growth of the use of VR to support teaching and learning, here are some online places to find 360° images to use with a simple head-mounted display. Again, students would have to search for images they are allowed to use by checking the licensing and usage rights.

The Flickr 360°group includes almost 30,000 images with many students can download and use with a headset or a 360° viewer app.

The Flickr Equirectangular group includes images that are taken or created in the 2:1 format that make them usable with a VR headset.

I have created a Flickr group, 360° Images for Schools, to collect Creative Commons-licensed 360° images from teachers and students around the world. The collection is growing to be a depository of images that can be downloaded and used in schools.

CREATIVE COMMONS

In March of 2015, my h blog post dealt with information literacy. One section of the post included information about the Creative Commons project, and it is worth reposting here!

The Creative Commons project has helped immensely with the ease of finding images that can be used in a research report or project.  The Creative Commons project allows content producers to explicitly state how their content may be used. These creators make a determination of whether their asset may be used commercially or just non-commercially, can be transformed into a new product by someone else, and, if they allow transforming of their work, the creators can also require the person who made the changes to apply the same Creative Commons license to their new creation and allow others to edit the new work.

When creators upload images to Flickr or a video to  YouTube, they can pick the combination of permissions they want to allow for the use of their creation, and the Creative Commons license is published.

The Creative Commons site has a search engine that allows students to search by license terms, but the three places that students usually search for information and images — Google, Flickr, and Bing — also have Creative Commons-licensed image searching built right in. It works pretty much the same way in each of these tools.

CITING IMAGES

It goes without saying that students should include citations for images they use in a project on a works-cited page. Another idea is to place the citation directly on the image, so it stays with the image if it is used again. This can easily be done in any of the meme apps or tools that allow text to be put on top of an image or in any traditional image-editing software. Another easy way to do this is for students to locate their images and save them on separate slides in Keynote, PowerPoint, or Google Slides. Then they can use the text tool to add the citation to the picture on the slide. When done collecting and adding citations to the images, students can simply export/save the slideshow out as JPEGS and the images are all set to use!

It is rare, on most image collections sites, to be able to identify all of these components in an attribution. The student should include as much information as possible and always include the URL of the image. In Flickr, when looking at an image in a collection, the student should go back to the original image and use that URL. For instance, an image in the 360° Images for Schools group will have a URL that looks like this:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/141855263@N03/27492650579/in/pool-360images4schools/

If I simply remove everything before the reference to the group, shown above in red, I am led to the creator’s Flickr account and the actual URL of the image which is https://www.flickr.com/photos/141855263@N03/2749265057 which is the URL that should be used in the image citation.

In addition, in Flickr, when looking at all sizes of the photo in order to download one that is the needed size, the URL changes, too. When picking the 1600×800 version of the image, as shown below, the URL changed to https://www.flickr.com/photos/141855263@N03/27492650579/sizes/h/ 

Again, simply delete the information after the photograph’s number, as indicated in red above, and use the URL of https://www.flickr.com/photos/141855263@N03/27492650579 in the citation.

There is one interesting Creative Commons image search engine designed for schools called Photos for Class. When a student does a search, and finds an image to download, the image downloads with the citation attached in a black bar at the bottom of the image (shown below). The citation includes the name of the creator, the title of the photo, and a clickable URL to the original image, and the Creative Commons license.

I think the site makes it easy for students to find images they have permission to use (even commercially) and have permission to edit. However, since the search engine only searches images that have this same license (CC BY 2.0), students are missing out on images that don’t allow editing, don’t permit commercial use, or  those requiring students to share their new work with the same license.

Do you have any favorite image sites to share or ways in which you teach students to search for and cite images? Please share on Twitter! #kathyschrock