One challenge that many teachers face is finding safe sites for students to use when looking for school-appropriate images to use in projects. As a general rule, I avoid sending students to a search engine to look for images. Too often, they waste class time looking at images that will not work. When they find images, it is important to teach them about usage rights and good digital citizenship.
My go to site of choice is Unsplash. The images are high resolution and free to use. The images are such good quality that you may find you need to lower the resolution or size in order to fit nicely in a project. Each image comes with a citation to make it easier to give credit to the photographer.
Pexels is another free stock photography site with stunning photography that I have started using recently. It also has an added bonus of offering small video clips. The images are very large and great quality. The photography citations are also available to copy, so you can give credit to the artist.
Another options for students to use is PxHere. This is another site offering free images and free stock photography. I found this site very helpful because the metadata of the image is included. Having that information has been helpful in explaining photography techniques. This site also lets you choose the file size for the download.
FreeImages.com is an easy to use site. I like that it allows you to choose the size of the download. This is really important when working with large projects or limited file storage space. The metadata for the image is given on the website, but it doesn’t offer citations as easily as some of the other options.
Photos for Class is another option that I recommend. The citation is automatically added onto the photo. It is important to note that the images are not as large and high resolution as some of the other options. If you don’t mind having the citation directly on the image, this is a great choice. This site links images from other websites, but they are filtered to be age-appropriate.
If you are looking for vintage black and white images or historical images that are copyright-free, try going ot New Old Stock Photos. Some of the images will link you to an outside source like Flickr or Tumblr. The images that I used were low-resolution, but the dimensions were large enough that I could make it work for the project that I needed.
Dawn Bradley Workshops 
Leave a Reply