Every day students are asked to include images in their projects and presentations without much advice on where they should search for those images or how they should use them once they are found. Generally, students will head to Google or Yahoo and grab the first one that pops up in their search. With that being said, "copyright" (and plagiarism for that matter) seems to be a word that most students don't fully understand. One way to encourage digital citizenship and appropriate use is to provide sites for students to use when searching for images. Recently, I happened upon an excellent resource for historical images from Life magazine. Using a custom Google search you can now look through the decades worth of images from Life magazine right on the web in the Google Life Archive. The Google Life Archive has great pictures broken out by decade as well as event and all images are public domain so they can be used without copyright issue.
Now What?
Images are powerful and students love to include them in their work but without a little guidance it can be a messy situation. Another great place for students to look for images is using the creative commons search site which links to multiple search engines for images and more.
Flocabulary is a rapper turned educational rapper and on his site he has some really great content that "used" to be free...but not anymore. However, each year for the last couple of years, he has put out a free rap recounting the last 18 years for those students graduating in June. The video and lyrics review the headlines for the last 18 years. If you would like to see the lyrics for the song you can check out Flocabulary's page. In addition, you can check out a bunch of free resources that go along with the song including activities and quiz questions.
Now What?
Unfortunately most of the resources found on Flocabulary are not free. This one is and can be a great way for students to take a look at the past 18 years and how our world has changed/been affected. Another great resource for educational raps is Rhyme N Learn which has a lot of great songs for math and science.
