iPads, MakerEd and More in Education

These top image and clip art sites provide an extensive supply of moderate- to high-quality visuals for cost-conscious schools.

In a move that has upset web users, Google has made it a little more difficult to download photos by killing its "view image" feature.

Sometimes you don't want to launch Photoshop just for a task as simple as image resizing. For that matter you can use the free online image resizing services.

ThingLink Edu is one of the best web tools you can use to annotate images and videos and create media rich visuals to share with your students in class. ThingLink enables you to add different layers of interactivity to your content. There are actually over 70 call to action tags to layer your content with including; web links. text, video, image, audio, maps and many more. The process to add Rich Media Tags to your content is ‘as simple as copying the URL into the Link field of the ThingLink tag editor.’

A picture is worth a thousand words, but it might also be worth a thousand dollars if your school gets hit with a copyright violation claim. This happens to schools every year as students or teachers inappropriately use an image that they do not have the rights to.

Thankfully this does not have to be the case as there are loads of high quality pictures that can be used in school projects without any licensing concerns. These can include images that are released under creative commons, or are in the public domain, or simply are copyright-free. Of course depending on the license, it may still be necessary to cite where the image came from to provide proper attribution (and it can be a good practice to do even if not required).

There are many sites and tools that can help educators and students find free photos, clipart, icons, and more. See below for a list of many of these, and be sure to share your suggestions for other resources to add to this collection.

One mission I have when teaching young children is helping them understand the different type of image files and discussions about file extensions.  The topics of .gif and .jpeg lead to great discussion about animated vs. non-animated images.  File extensions can help students think about different programs and what type of files are needed or created.   Understanding image resolution helps them create higher quality media that doesn’t contain pixelated images.