I’m up to Step 6 of the edublogs free self-paced course to help set up an educator blog. I think this is the step that I am going to struggle with as we have all become used to retweeting, sharing on facebook etc. Most times we don’t give it a second thought when we use images etc in worksheets that we create for students. So I am going to put some reminders for myself here to come back to and check regularly that I am doing the right thing. Am I allowed to copy and paste information from the course on my blog??? I guess I will find out …..
I liked the picture on the edublog course, but at this stage I not sure if I can use it. So I created my own from a picture I took of flowers that a student gave me. I have to work out a better way to put text on an image than in the picture editor. NOTE TO SELF: put on to-do-list.
The safest way to source images for your blog is to either:
- Use Creative Commons images.
- Use free (Creative Commons Zero) or public domain images.
- Use your own photos or use images you’ve created.
Including the source of the image is not enough.
Creative Commons licenses: books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs, and other audio and visual recordings. If any of these things don’t include a CC license, or isn’t public domain work or doesn’t indicate that the content is free to use, then don’t use it.
Unless a blogger includes a Creative Commons license, all content on that blog is automatically the copyright of the blogger.
Sources of CC images –
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/
- Compfight – easy way to find Flickr Creative Commons images: http://compfight.com/
- A direct Creative Commons site in Flickr – Explore / Creative commons website: https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
- Multicolr Search Lab: http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr/ (This looks like fun! I looked up purple and pink and found some science related photos, mainly microscope slides)
Free and Public Domain Images
- Pixabay https://pixabay.com/ – found some really nice science images
- Openclipart https://openclipart.org/ – also has a lot of science images
- Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page – has science images but a bit more fiddly to use
- Unsplash https://unsplash.com/ – some very general but nice science images e.g. microscopes lined up on a bench, flowers in test tubes etc.
- Getty Open Content images http://search.getty.edu/gateway/search?q=&cat=highlight&f=%22Open+Content+Images%22&rows=10&srt=a&dir=s&pg=1 – this may not be very useful for science, but the images of the old texts, paintings etc is really cool!
- Getty Images https://www.gettyimages.com.au/ – great science images
- Use your own images
All the images on Pixabay and Unsplash are Creative Commons Zero. They do not require any attribution and can be modified.