Pictures to use in class projects have been gathered by several groups – pics4learning.com is one such group.
“Pics4Learning is a curated image library that is safe and free for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos and illustrations for classroom projects, web sites, videos, portfolios, or any other projects in an educational setting.”(Pics4Learning)
Pics4Learning is split into forty-five sections covering titles such as: Toys, Food, Animals, Dinosaurs, Oceans, Space, Transportation, Art, Countries, Geography, Parts of your Body, Weather, Religion etc. The ones I have mentioned are the those that I thought may be the most useful for our schools.
Please be aware that it is an American site so there is a lot of USA related imagery; however, the countries section has the most wonderful photographs from many famous places and landmarks in the world.
I did a search for Romans and it produced eight pages of amazing, mostly real Roman artefacts: forts, wall, moats, amphitheatre, baths, ruins, mosaics, roads etc; however, a few photos were obvious recreations – people dressed as Romans etc. These images came from several countries and categories but the search tool brought them all together.
I went into the animals section, where there are hundred of lovely images. I did a search for reptiles and once again it offered ten pages of reptile photos – sadly adding either the UK or British failed to produce as list of photos of the few reptiles we have here. So it is great, but not perfect. Nevertheless, it has lots of wonderful images that children can use freely in their project work.
Each picture has the following copyright notice: “This image may be used by teachers and students in school and classroom activities for the express purpose of improving student educational opportunities. The photographer retains the copyright to this image.” ( pics4learning.com ) As you can see, the notice makes it very clear that the site provides pictures to use in class, for educational purposes only.
