Great Stock Photos

One of the harder things to do for a presentation is get good royalty free photographs to display in your presentation. Sure it is easy to just google a topic and use the photo that comes up whether it is free to use or not. Sure there are ways to search on Google for Creative Commons images you can use. But you might still not find what you are looking for. The Stocks comes in to save the day. Advertised as "the best royalty free stock photos in one place", The Stocks features many sites that do offer high-resolution photos free for you to use.
As always I offer a word of caution before using these type of sites with students as the pictures do update. So just because you didn't find any inappropriate pictures today doesn't mean there might not be some tomorrow.
Give The Stocks a try.
http://thestocks.im/

Photos For Class

Photos for Class allows users to search and download properly attributed, Creative Commons photos for school. One of the issues with using photos from the web in a school project is copyright. Photos for Class searches Flickr for images licensed for a creative commons school use. According to their site they meet the needs for images by providing:

• Safe G Rated Images - All images are appropriate for school setting thanks to Flickr safe Search and our proprietary filters
• Automatic Citation - Downloaded images automatically cite the author and the image license terms 
• Creative Commons - All photos shown are to the best of our (and Flickr's) knowledge Creative Commons licensed for school use

http://photosforclass.com

With each picture download the citation is automatically added to the photo at the bottom in the black area as seen in the example below.

As with any picture search, the teacher should first search for terms the students would search for their project to determine the "Safe G Rated Images" the website boasts. But this site should help with the question, "Where did this photo come from?"

Photos and Videos

 

I recently came across two resources for teachers that utilize the Creative Commons to provide photos and videos you can use in your lessons and presentations.

Compfight -  http://compfight.com/ - Compfight is a Flickr Search engine that will allow your searches to display creative commons and commercial license photo that other users have uploaded.

Videezy - http://www.videezy.com/ - Videezy provides B-Roll HD video that other users have uploaded. You do have to create a free account to save and download.


In my first sentence note I said resources for teachers. I have not been through every photo and every video to determine questionable material (and what one calls questionable others may not). As always teachers should thoroughly preview any sites they intend to use with students.