Twenty-one Images on Pics4Learning

I was looking for a great place to find images for students. I had two criteria: 1) images had to be 100% Kindergarten to eighth grade appropriate 2) images had to be usable in student projects either on the Internet or within the confines of the school. The site I used was Pics4Learning.

Better Than Last Year
I've been aware of the site for a while. I bookmarked it in delicious in August of 2007. I hadn't really taken my students to the site because it seemed to lack depth in the number of photos offered. Since then a lot of people have been adding their images.

Fourth Grade Bird Project
My fourth grade students are using the images exclusively in their seven facts about birds project. An added bonus to this site is the bibliography information that is included at the bottom of each image. It's almost a simple copy and paste. Sometimes the students forget to copy and paste the citation. Sometimes the citations are all there, but not in the same order as the slides. For this year, I am being lenient.

Twenty-one Images
I took some time on February 15th to load a bunch of my images from Flickr onto Pics4Learning. I was surprised how long it took for them to show up in their listings. It was just about one month. Here they are - all twenty-one of them - as of today.

Now that my students have been downloading images, I'm going to be a little less generous in the size of the photos I upload to Pics4Learning. My fourth graders had a fair sized job dragging the images into PowerPoint and resizing them. Additionally, the photos were so large that the PowerPoint files were in the 17MB range. The size of the files were bringing the Macs to their wireless knees as they were opened from the file server.

So Many Generous Photographers
There are so many generous teachers labeling their images with Creative Commons licenses in Flickr. I still will not bring my students to that site to search for images. I wish Flickr had a child-safe setting. I don't really want to use FlickrStorm because it requires effort on my part to generate the sets of images. I really want my students to do the selecting. I'm still unclear about how to save the sets for use in the classroom.

It is my hope that these same teachers will start sharing their images on Pics4Learning too.

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Image Citation:
My 2008fireworks5.jpg on Pics4Learning.