Images for Education

One big issue facing art programs in K-12 schools is censorship and content in regards to integrating technology into the classrooms. I recall that when I was taking art in highschool, we always had trouble searching for images to use for reference in our art projects. While copyright is an underlying issue, the biggest hindrance was the amount of content blocked on the school computers.

For instance:

A student is doing a surrealism piece and has to incorporate three elements that do not ordinarily go together and has to make them work together compositionally. The student chooses a ferrari, great white shark, and a coconut. In order for the student to accurately depict each of these things in their work, they must have reference photos to work from. The student attempts to do a Google Image search. Google Images is blocked by the school's administrative server. The student tries to go to Photostock or Corbis images to find their reference images. No luck there either. This student is stuck, having to use more ordinary objects that they can observe physically in their project, therefore limiting the creativity of the work and the satisfaction of the student and the teacher.

To help remedy this problem, many people have given their time and money to create web resources with FREE IMAGES...that's right I'll say it again: FREE IMAGES for educational use. These sites collect images from photographers and other users who donate pictures to the sites, allowing teachers and students to access the images for educational purposes for free. Some restrictions apply depending on the author of the work; some photographers would like their name or personal website referenced somewhere with the finished piece to get recognition for the image, but this is way better than paying for images or continually running into roadblocks from the administrative powers.

Here are a few that I have found:

http://www.photos8.com/

http://www.pics4learning.com/

http://www.stockvault.net/

http://www.freefoto.com/ - this one has lots of pop-ups, be aware.

commons.wikimedia.org

These are just a few, I'm sure you could find others that would work just as well.