Education is sometimes linked to learning either boring/serious facts with few eye-catching attributes in them in the form of worksheets, presentations and handouts. I must admit, adding pictures isn't the main way to get the point across, but it sure does help to gain students' attention and prolong their attention span in a lesson, regardless of what subject you're teaching. Science, languages, social subjects, art (obviously), even maths, there's always the added fun factor when several senses (ie. visual, kinaesthetic and auditory) are used during teaching.
Using images to assist your teaching will also make it more interesting for those who learn through pictures, colors and shapes instead of texts and numbers due to their left/right brain orientation. This is because these 'image-related' activities activates the right side of the brain. Using both sides of the brain helps students to have a better understanding of what they are learning, and at the same time exercises both brain hemispheres instead of focusing on only one.
All that aside, this entry will focus on means to find appropriate AND interesting pictures that I always go to whenever I'm in need of photos. Please not however, that these are user-content sites, so there are copyright issues, so do check where appropriate, and inform/credit where due.
tonnes of amazing photos by amazing photographers, some are personal, some are professional works (no need for signup). The picture in this entry (of the boy reaching up to colorful mobiles) is taken by a flickr user, ajpscs, who takes amazing photos of Japanese culture, among other things.
Most are royalty-free, high-quality images (requires signup). The top header of the blog, featuring the board and duster, is by a sxc.hu user, ywell. :)
[ link @ jamiekeddie.com ]
He offers 6 links to really interesting sites on the internet.
This particular page offers 50 links of free stock image sites of various kind! A few links are no longer working, however.
Of course, you can always Google-imagesearch to find more resources, but remember to use high-resolution images. Resizing images affects the quality of the image, especially so if they are made bigger (making them smaller doesn't reduce the quality as much).
Extra stuff!
When you have images, sometimes it requires a little bit of editing like resizing, sharpenning, blurring etc. To edit images, I use Macromedia Fireworks (or sometimes Adobe Photoshop), but most of the time I only use Irfanview.
Irfanview is a very simple and compact tool to edit your images. It's extremely lightweight so you can keep it in your computer, laptop, flashdrive, and have it virtually anywhere with you (pun intended ;P). I've used this for years, it's really useful and highly recommended!
Have fun with your visual wanderings on the net and hope this helps!
