Using Digital Images

I’ve observed middle school students work on projects about U.S. landmarks, countries and cultures, science projects and more. Students are searching for resources on line, gathering information and copying photos. It seems that the students are not recording any information on where the images are coming from. There seems to be a lack of awareness, even on the instructor's part, that both text and images require a citation.

Students need guidance on what is allowed to be copied from the Web, and what isn’t. This could easily be a topic for a pre-writing activity. There are several resources on copyright within the Thinkfinity community. Do you know copyright law?, posted by Lynne Hoffman is one discussion post.Understanding Copyright in a Media-Rich World provides links to lessons for use in the classroom that will lead your students to respecting the work of others.

Many educators prefer to use only royalty free web sites when images are required as part of an assignment. Some instructors explain what Creative Commons is and use sites like Flickr. There are sites that offer many images that are available and are in the public domain. FCIT and Pics4Learning are two sites that are a source of royalty free images. I realize Google Images is one of the first resources that comes to the mind of many, but it isn’t necessarily the best tool to use in school. A good example of why not is that kids don’t always know the best keywords to use. Today, the use of “whitehouse” in a Google search and then selection of ‘images’ on the left, brought some very graphic images to view that were not of Washington.

This post is to act as a reminder that educators need to provide direct guidance and be available to intervene whenever students are working on the Web. As to citing sources, why not use BibMe? Students will find this to be very easy to use and guidance is provided to cite magazines, books, film, and the Web.Son of Citation Machine and EasyBib are similar sites. ReadWriteThink provides an internet search organizer.