You can find free images from a variety of museum image collections.
Met Museum collection, public domain image.
These images are of high quality, and you and your students can use them in presentations and other multimedia that you create, in photo essays, digital stories, and blog posts. High resolution images provide excellent detail, which is well suited to many activities. If you are a teacher, you can use them as prompts for writing exercises, and for discussions. They can be a resource for both fiction, and non-fiction work in the classroom.
The Metropolitan Museum recently announced that many of their images would be licensed as CC0, which means that anyone can use them without any rights reserved. Here are three museums, with collections of images in the public domain. I’ve hyperlinked to the public domain collection in each case.
Visit The Commons on Flickr for other Creative Commons licensed images from various institutions.
As a bonus, Creative Commons has its own image search engine, out in beta. It lets you find images licensed with Creative Commons from Flickr, MMA, New York Public library, Rijksmuseum, and The Met. While it’s only for images, you can still access the old CC search if you’re looking for other types of media.
For other sources of images, read my other posts on getting free images online here and here.
Thanks for sharing your list of free high quality Image sites. Is the date at the end of the post meant to be 10 Feb 2017?
I also use Pixabay – https://pixabay.com/ Have you used this with students?
@suewaters
Thanks for the correction, @suewaters. I have used Pixabay with students, but I don’t like the inclusion of the Shutterstock images. I’m amazed at how many students choose to use images with the watermark, but perhaps that’s a good teaching opportunity!
Thanks! Was curious why it wasn’t on the list. It’s a hard question. I’m also conflicted with Creative Commons vs Free to use. Do we teach them to use Creative commons images only to ensure they understand that you should only use images you are allowed to? Maybe it is all good teaching opportunities?.
To me, the enduring understanding that I would like for students to have is that they should only use images with permission. Sometimes that permission is broadly given with images in the public domain, and sometimes the permission is conveyed through Creative Commons licenses. In each case, it is the responsibility of the user to confirm the terms of use. The conflict that I have is in captioning images from the public domain. Do I need to identify Public Domain images in the caption? I don’t always but I think that it may be a good habit to always include image source in the caption or endnotes/footnotes.
It depends on where you source the public domain image from. Some of these sites include guidelines for how the image should be attributed. I discuss it here under the Public domain images section – http://teacherchallenge.edublogs.org/step-7-images-copyright-and-creative-commons/