Google and the Creative Commons

Anyone who works with students on digital image projects knows what a major battle it can be to get students to use copyright-appropriate media. "Why can't I just search Google images?" becomes a frequent whine.

Well, now they can.

Using Google Image Advanced Search allows students to set a variety of criteria when they search. Specifically, the "Usage Rights" option offers to limit results to those "labeled for reuse," generating entire banks of rights-friendly images for media projects.



The other options provide even greater control. Search by size, orientation (tall, landscape, etc)file type and color or black and white.

In fact--and I really LOVE this--click on the options link, and you can search for images with a dominant color. Here are the results for a "civil war" search with yellow selected. This is great for art teachers and projects that need some color-coordination.

You can even select the "Face" option, returning only portrait results.
Flickr creative commons is still a wonderful tool, obviously, though one that's frequently filtered in schools. Google Images now provides a viable and easy alternative.

Hmmmm....Google Life Anachronisms

Our Tech Director pointed out a couple...questionable...photos in the Google/Life project. Well, the photos aren't questionable, but the metadata is.

Check here and here.

These are both from 1901??? I doubt Quincy Jones would be flattered at the implication! : )

Google Life

Google announced a partnership with Life Magazine today to make almost 10 million of the magazine's (often iconic) photographs available to the public. You can find them here. According to The Guardian, only about 20% of the collection is currently available, organized by decade, and fully 97% of them have never been seen before.

Obviously, these will be great to use in history classes, but they'd also serve as writing prompts for English (or to coincide with novel readings), or for art/photography classes.

A Picture's Worth...

We're having an image crisis at the school. Since Gale no longer carries the Corbis database, teachers are struggling to find good quality images to use in the classroom, and United Streaming isn't a lot of help, since we just subscribe to the basic version. So I put together this image resource wiki page. Joyce Valenza also has a good resource page for images here.