Community reviews for Photos for Class

Photos For Class provides a much needed repository of good images with proper license for schools. The fact that the images download with the attribution baked into the image is a huge time-saver for students. The site layout is a little rough, including a few misspellings, but the quality of the content is excellent. A bit more polish and tutorial on how to attribute images would take this site to the top of the image repositories for schools.

Teaching kids how to find, use, and cite creative commons licensed photos is a must hand skill for the 21st century. There are numerous ways that kids can search these photos. I have sent kids directly to Flickr to search, but that often take multiple steps to get a photo with a proper attribution. I have also used Compfight, but I found that since their default search of Flickr is set to ANY LICENSE, this can cause unnecessary headaches. I believe that Photos for Class is just what a teacher needs. I can send a student there and the student can get high quality relevant visual aids that are properly attributed very quickly. I don't have to waste precious class time wandering in a sea of photos and trying to create an attribution. One click of a download button, and the kid is set. I did a few searches to see what sorts of things would pop up. I searched for images for happiness, sadness, brainstorm, gladiator, Lego Harry Potter, Vespa, trench warfare, riot, Baltimore riot, Animal Farm Orwell, baseball field, etc. What is nice is that I got great images on the first page of each search. Because this website harvests Flickr, it means that kids can get access to recent current events item as long as the photographers tag them as such. The website has a small section on how they create their attributions and WHY they do it. It is a nice little basic overview of Creative Commons. Unfortunately, it is somewhat hidden in a link at the bottom of the page UNDER the search bar where many students and teachers might not look. I would prefer that this information is more prevalent for students and teachers.

This tool is more of a research tool than a teaching tool. You can choose to teach about citing sources properly, and why we need to give credit to photographers, but other than that, it is more of a repository of safe images to use. It has definite benefits, but not a whole lot of learning is involved.