A colleague asked me what was the easiest way to find free-to-use images, which her students could use for a space exploration presentation without requesting permission to use said images. Of course, the easiest and quickest solution is to use Google. Type in your keywords, select images, tools, and usage rights, and select labeled for reuse (with or without modification). Download, or copy the image, get the owner’s name and URL – the job is done.
Opportunities
But hold up! I saw an opportunity to teach her students about how to use two other image websites, which are attribution free (although we got them to add citations), and of course free to use and download. These are Unsplash and Pixabay.
Searching for images on these two websites is not a difficult thing to teach, nor should it be. As anticipated, we found that it took 2-3 minutes longer to search and find an image that met the needs of the project than on Google.
Persevere
Initially, the students found it frustrating because, unlike Google, the images they wanted to do not magically appear on the first page of results; but they persevered regardless. They persevered by; scrolling through more pages of results, changing their search criteria, clicking on the tags for each picture, checking other works by the same author, and exploring related images. This perseverance paid off through a deeper level of understanding of space exploration and indeed Pixabay and Unsplash.
Learning in Action
It was just fantastic to see this real learning happening – from what could have been a very simple and meaningless task – no offense Google. By real learning I mean they spent time thinking about the impact that keywords have on results. They even discovered what tags were! As we got them to download images, they also learned the importance of changing the file names, and in Pixabay, they learned about file sizes and types; they provide different download options.
But the best part of this was the students began to understand that there are creators of these images Furthermore, they started to realize that they could be the next generation of digital creators and empowered contributors.
Thank you Unsplash and Pixabay, for your free-to-use images.