Finding Photos for Educational Use

I am constantly in need of good photos for instructional projects. I have recently worked on a project for a Spanish/ English Green Curriculum course. The book only provides small, poorly done, black and white clip art. This is not appropriate or useful for a college level course; so I (with the help of a student worker) put together a collection of photography that can be used in practice exercises, flash cards, other instructional materials and testing.

We could go and take photos, but photos for some of the terminology would have been impossible to get, as most of this work was done last winter. Like, photos of specific plants during winter. Also, the time invested in taking photos and adjusting them would be to much, knowing that there should be good photos available. We could buy photos from a stock company, oh wait, we are a public community college; asking for money to buy a couple hundred photos for one teacher and one specific class is not likely to be approved.

So what is available for free. The internet is the wild, wild west when it comes to finding materials and we do have an obligation and desire to obey copyright. Creative commons images and public domain images are the best source! It just so happens in the last couple years, the resources for creative commons images and public domain images have grown leaps and bounds. Very exciting. When I first started my position 11 years ago, there was very little available and easy to find on the internet in terms of creative commons or public domain images.

What is creative commons? You don't know, Only the greatest thing since sliced bread!

If you aren't familiar with creative commons, start researching, my friend. Here's a few resources to get you started:

• http://creativecommons.org/about
• Educause 7 Things You Should Know Series on Creative Commons [PDF]

Public domain  according to the Copyright and Fair Use Information provided on Stanford University Libraries website tells us that works no longer protected by intellectual property laws (a.k.a. really old stuff) fall under the public domain area. Meaning they can be used, edited, etc...  Some works created by or for the U.S. government fall under public domain. My best advice about using public domain works, verify from a good source that it is public domain before using it. Just because you see on a website, "free, public domain" doesn't always mean it is.

Another term related to creative commons and public domain is Open Educational Resources, often referred to as OER. This is another area that is growing leaps and bounds, more and more educators are contributing to this concept of shared resources for education and that's exactly what OER is.

Now that we've discussed the terminology, let's find some images. Here are the sources I usually use to find images.

If your school is a Microsoft Licensed Products school, in most cases you will be using MS products to organize or layout your images. Start with finding images, via insert > clipart. I find PowerPoint the easiest to search for clip art with. The Microsoft Image gallery is actually a pretty good source. Search their online website, also, I sometimes find images that don't show up in my searches within PowerPoint. Within PowerPoint on the clip art panel, you will find a link to the gallery called "Find more at Office.com"

Many government sites provide photo galleries and the images can be used under fair use or creative commons for educational purposes. This url is a good place to start: http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Graphics.shtml. Links to many US government photo galleries are listed. As the site states, be sure to check the usage guidelines for each gallery/image you use. If it lists a photographer, it's always a good idea to give credit to the photographer, somewhere in your work.

You can also search by state for Photo and Multimedia galleries through the USA.gov site. I also find a lot of good images on the USDA Agricultural Research Service Image Gallery. Another good options is the National Science Digital Library website. Many organizations provide an image gallery for educational use. The United States Antarctic Program Photo Library is yet another good source. The Earth Science World Image Bank is a great source of science images for education. The National Institute of Health is another government website that offers several photo galleries: http://www.nih.gov/about/nihphotos.htm

Some smaller photo sites that have been developed for the purpose of sharing images under Creative Commons are FreeFoto.com, http://morguefile.com/, http://pics.tech4learning.com/ (specifically for educators). Another is http://pixabay.com/, I have used this site a lot lately and find really good, high quality images.

A great source of creative commons images is flickr creative commons: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ and you can also use http://photopin.com/. Photo Pin is a really easy site to use, it searches the flickr creative commons images. I would recommend when you find the image you want, click the get photo and then copy the url, paste it in a new tab and just check the source of the image on flickr to make sure it is in fact a creative commons image. I do find good images this way and like their search features. Hope these sites help you find some great images for educational use. I'd love to hear what other resources you use?

7 Ideas for Designing a PowerPoint Presentation

Several years ago I used to give a presentation on general design principles for creating PowerPoint presentations. Someone asked for a copy of my handouts the other day and I thought I better look over it, it's probably very out-dated. As I look over it, I am reminded that no matter the technology and how things changed good design principles are still good design principles!

PowerPoint is a powerful tool that can enhance any presentation, but it can easily become a distraction if not designed well. The first and most basic principle of designing a strong presentation is “Keep it Simple”. It is also important to remember that just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to use it. PowerPoint offers a lot of additional “fun” effects, but they aren’t always good design choices.

1. Your content should be simple and concise.
You don’t want your audience to read your presentation word for word. So use PowerPoint to emphasize the main points of your presentation and display supplementary graphics and visuals.

2. Choose an appropriate color scheme and/ or template design.
Let your content “reign”, don’t choose a flashy template, graphics or animation that will smother your message. The background or template is where you’ll layout your text and images, choose a simple background and if you use a generic template use one that is relative to your content and fits your audience. For example, if you are presenting to the National Association of Law Students don’t choose the crayons template, choose a professional looking template. When you choose a template or color scheme consider the environment that the presentation will be presented in. If you are giving a presentation in a bright room then dark text on a light background works well. If you are projecting the presentation on a screen in a large room with dim lights choose a dark background and light text. With the exception of photos and graphics limit your color scheme to 3-4 colors. A standard approach would be a solid background color, a text color for the title and a text color for the bullet points. Possibly a secondary color for the sub-points.

3. Keep the slide layout simple and allow plenty of space.
When laying out your slides think about heirarchy and what’s most import, emphasize the most important elements with bold, underline and/ or larger text. Don’t crowd the slide, space is good!! When using bullet points, don’t center the bullets, it makes them hard to read. Limit the lines of text to about 6 - 8 lines per slide with a minimum of about 20pt type. Always keep about a 1/4 to a 1/2 inch border of empty or “safe” space around the edge of your slide. Different projectors and media present images differently, you don’t want to have some of your text cut off.

4. Choose the right Font, Font, Font for your presentation.
It is most important to be consistent. Don’t use more than one or two fonts in a presentation. Your variety and emphasis comes in choosing bold, normal, italics and underline. You can choose either a Sans-serif or a Serif font. A Sans-serif font is a basic font that is unified in size and does not have “feet” or decorations, like Arial, Gill Sans and Verdana. A Serif font is more decorative, the width or size of the stroke of the letter may vary and it has “feet” or “hooks” on the corners, like Times New Roman and Garamond. Sans-serif font is easiest to read when there is a lot of text. Consider using a Sans-serif, for the whole presentation or try a serif font for all of the titles and a sans-serif font for all of the text or bullet points.

5. Type size and other attributes have a great impact on legibility.
The text size is dependant on your presenation mode, if you are posting the presentation on the web your text can be slightly smaller. In general don’t make your type any smaller than 22pt. I’ve found that 36 - 44pt headers/ titles and 24 - 36pt bullet points/ text are a decent and legible size for presenting on a large screen. Choose Colors that work well with your background color. In general never use more than 3 colors of text per slide. A good approach is to choose one color for your headers/ title and another color for your bullet points/ text and possibly a third color for secondary points.

6. Graphics and Photos can make or break your presentation.
Use graphics or photos that directly relate to your presentation. Limit the amount of graphics or photos in your presentation so that they are not a distraction. Do not use more than one or two images on a slide. Be careful of clip art; choose clip art that serves a purpose in your presentation and that fits your audience. Consider the style of clip art and how it works with your presentation style. Lots of clip art in various styles may be a distraction.

Keep your clipart and photos in proportion. If you scale the image, make sure you click the picture then hold down the shift key while dragging the image to the size you want. Remember also that the more photos and clip art you use in a presentation the larger your file size will be. Compress your images to help with file size, but be sure to check the images on the large screen to make sure you haven’t lost the quality of the image.

Try to avoid running text over a graphic or image. This is usally hard to read and creates a distraction.

7. Animation can enhance a presentation if used in moderation.
PowerPoint gives you a couple of animation options; you can apply a transition or animation to all slides and/ or you can add custom animation to any object in the presentation. Be consistent throughout your presentation. Pick one transition to apply to all slides or don’t use a transition. If you choose to use custom animation, pick a simple animation scheme and be consistent. For example, if you decide that all images will fade in on mouse click then use that throughout the whole presentation. Random animation can make your presentation look unprofessional and distract your audience. In addition you can insert animated images onto
a slide. Animated clip art and images are often a distraction and draw attention away from the main points of your presentation. Only use animation if it serves a direct purpose in your presentation, such as, teaching or explaining a concept.

These seven ideas can guide you towards designing a professional presentation. There are exceptions to the do’s and don’ts suggested here, but if you begin with these basic guidelines you’ll master the ability to determine when it’s appropriate to go against them.

Power Point Creating Well Designed Presentations from bthat

The presentation above is old but still has some valid design principles in it. Realize this presentation was actually done in PPT2007 for a live audience, some of the slides are have intentional issues so that we could discuss them as a class.

It is always good to be reminded of basic design principles.

Twitter Integration for Course Management Systems

There are several posts out there on using twitter in the classroom and teachers using twitter for professional development.
Read a great post by Mrs. Laura Walker on Nine reasons why teachers should use twitter (for their own professional development) and 50 brief ideas for using twitter in the classroom.

Most course management systems have an announcement system. In some you may have the ability to update your announcements from a mobile device using an app for the course management system.

Another approach to this would be using twitter, here's how:
Create a twitter profile for your course or courses; the idea being you don't want all your personal or even other unrelated professional tweets showing up - just those related to your course.
In twitter on the Settings link for the account, you will have to "unprotect" the tweets and allow them to be public (otherwise students would have to log into a twitter account to view the tweets). Chances of your course tweets being found by someone you didn't give directions to follow are probably unlikely. I'm assuming what you post to your course students in 140 or less characters is not anything so private or confidential that it would matter if someone came across it.

Go to http://twitter.com/goodies/widgets and click the "My Website" link on the left.
Click "Profile Widget" and enter your course twitter username.
Click the Preferences, Appearance and Dimensions tabs on the left to customize the look of the twitter feed to match your course.

In this example, I'm using Blackboard. I can click the color boxes on the Appearance link to choose colors that match my course color scheme.
The Dimensions tab is probably the most important. I want to set a dimension size that allows the whole width of the twitter feed to show up in the frame of my course management system. I set the width to 525 and the height to 400, this appears to fit very well in the Blackboard 9 Basic Announcements page layout. You might have to experiment to get yours to fit correctly. Just keep following the steps and changing the dimensions then copying and pasting until you are happy with how it looks in your course.

You can click the "Test Settings" button at the bottom to view it (for some reason this doesn't reflect the new dimensions). Click the "Finish & Grab Code" button. Click inside the box to highlight all of the code and choose "Edit>Copy" from the browser (or Ctrl+C).

Log into your course management system and go to your announcements section. Click the "Create Announcement" button. In the subject enter a title like "EDU 101 Tweets" or "official Course Announcements" or whatever fits your course, just make sure student can easily identify it. In the message box below, click the "<>" html source button.


Paste the code you copied from the twitter profile widget into this box. In the options section of your Blackboard Announcement choose "Permanent" and click the "Submit" button. You should now see your live twitter feed in your course announcement, click it and drag it to the top of your announcements page so it will always be at the top.


You may want to add an additional permanent announcement below your twitter feed explaining what twitter is and a link to the twitter account. Make sure the non-twitter users know they can log in and see your most recent "tweets" or announcements live in the box anytime and let those who use twitter know they can follow the account directly and even connect with their mobile to get all the latest course "tweets."

The real advantage of integrating twitter is ease of posting announcements to your course(s) for the teacher and for the student getting real time announcements. Especially for your students that already use twitter and want to easily get course announcements on their mobile devices without logging into their course management system. You are also exposing students to a social media technology that is quickly becoming main stream in a way that's safe (through their course management environment) and only requires them to observe if that's all they are comfortable with.

Blackboard 9 mobile learn was released today: http://www.blackboard.com/Mobile/Mobile-Learn.aspx This will also accomplish the same task for those mobile users, but it does require accessing an app on the mobile device to use it. Beyond that I've not had an opportunity to work with it yet, so there could be more to post on it later.

A good way for the teacher to manage multiple twitter accounts is using an application called "TweetDeck" you can download this to your desktop, ipad or iphone (I hear there will be a droid app soon, no timeline given). TweetDeck will allow you to log into multiple twitter accounts at once, just be sure to identify which one you're posting to.

Happy course announcement tweeting!

The Value of Twitter as part of your PLN

I know what you're thinking.. twitter. Oh, another "twit." I thought that, too. I figured twitter was for people that wanted to broadcast to the world what they were doing every second, "eating breakfast", "taking the dog for a walk, now the dog is..."

Well there are a lot of people that use twitter that way. That's okay we aren't going to "follow" those people!

Let's talk first about what a PLN is and then we'll get back to twitter. A PLN is a Personal or Professional Learning Network. With all of the Web 2.0 tools available, anyone can get on the internet and create their own PLN. Twitter is a great way to get started.

Twitter can be found at http://www.twitter.com/ Twitter is a microblog. It's simply a webpage that you customize with a username and as much or as little information about yourself as you want to provide. At the top of the page is a textbox. You can enter up to a 140 characters in the box to answer the question "What are you doing now?"

See the twitter help section for thorough details on getting started using twitter. http://help.twitter.com/home

Find twitter lingo at: http://twictionary.pbworks.com/

Using twitter for your Professional Learning Network is a great way to get started.
Go to twitter.com and create an account. You don't have to provide a bunch of personal information, if you don't want to. I would recommend not posting to twitter at all at first. Just use twitter to "follow" some of the experts. You might have noticed that many of your favorite websites or blogs have the small blue bird icon and say something like follow me on twitter.

Go to some of the expert blogs or organization websites that you visit and look for the icon. Click on it to go to their twitter profile. Click the "Login" link in the upper right corner and log in with your twitter username and password. After you log in, you will be taken back to the user's twitter profile and you'll see a "Follow" button directly under their photo. Click the Follow button and you'll see a yellow banner that says "You are now following ...."

Congratulations you've just increased your Personal Learning Network by one! Click the "Home" button in the white bar at the upper right corner of the page. You'll now see your twitter page. Any posts (known as tweets) the users you are following make will show up on your page. This is a great way to get the best ideas, tutorials, techniques, resources. Only Follow experts in your field. If you follow someone for a while and they don't post anything good or you don't like their post, you can always stop following them at anytime. You don't have to post anything yourself. Just use it to get great resources from your favorite experts. Just about everyone in the professional world has a twitter and is happy to have followers (it's like having groupies). It's the closest us geeks will ever get to having fans :).

A few tips for getting started:
1.) Create an account.
2.) Be very selective about who you choose to follow.
3.) Keep your account professional/ only follow professionals/ allow professionals to follow you.
4.) If you want to get personal or goofy with it, create a separate twitter account with a different
username and don't use the personal account on/ at your job.
5.) Don't post until you've observed posts of the experts for a while. You don't have to post at all
you know, that's okay. Your twitter is for professional learning, so don't post personal things,
only post professional ideas, resources, etc...
6.) You will have "spammers" and people trying to make money request to follow you. It's OKAY
and best if you decline their requests to follow you.
7.) Be even more selective about who you accept to follow you. If you feel bad delcining them.
You can always decline them and send them a direct message saying. I don't want anybody to
follow me. I just use twitter for resources and don't post.

Hope these tips help you find twitter as a valuable part of your learning network.

Want to follow me: http://twitter.com/bthat - I have to admit, I'm not that exciting. However I follow some exciting people. Just click the small "following" link under my profile information on the right to see the list of the experts, I follow. Click on any of them to see their profile. Review their postings to see if they'd be valuable for you to follow.

Your Professional Learning Environment

I'm getting ready to do a session on web 2.0 and professional development next week and it's made me think a lot about professional development in the last month or so. With web 2.0, there's no reason to not be involved in your own professional development. I've discovered that professional development no longer happens just through formal courses, workshops, training events, etc...

The best of the best in your field are easily accessible via web 2.0 apps. This is so true for education and technology. Most all of the experts have their own personal blogs, many are on twitter and have thousands of followers, they participate in social networks, online webinars and podcasts and many if not most of these are FREE! So what's your reason for not getting involved??

Don't know where to start. That's what I hear from most people. I've created a few handouts on getting started with your own Professional (or Personal) Learning Environment and staying current.

PLE's: Tips and Getting Started Information for Creating your own Personal Learning Environment [PDF]: http://www.icc.edu/innovation/PDFS/resources/PLEs.pdf

Using Technology to Stay Current: Online Resources to Customize, Collect and Organize Current Information [PDF]: http://www.icc.edu/innovation/PDFS/resources/UsingTechnologytoStayCurrent.pdf

I also wanted to share some of my best or favorite resources that I use in my own Professional Learning Environment to learn and stay current, you can find that at
http://www.netvibes.com/bthat

I'll also get my blogroll updated with some of the best education and technology bloggers on the web.

Your PLN and PLE

You do have a PLN and a PLE right?

Okay, what am I talking about now? PLN stands for Personal (or Professional)Learning Network and a PLE stands for Personal (or Professional)Learning Environment. We all need professional development. With all of the web 2.0 technologies available to anyone, professional development no longer means attending an expensive conference and staying in a fancy hotel. We can now create our own method of professional development.

You can buy software or pay a fee to have a PLE or you can create your own. The key to any great PLE is an even greater PLN. We all learn from each other and we all want to learn from the best. It used to be that you'd have to attend a conference or workshop to learn form the best. With social networking tools like twitter and ning you can create your own PLN.

I participated in an online webinar last night hosted by PBS Teachers. If you are not familiar with PBS Teachers, check it out at http://www.pbs.org/teachers/. Targeted at K12 but still a lot of greate resources for anyone in education. The session was on using the summer to develop your PLN. If you're not familiar with PLN or PLE or social media and it's value as a PLN, this webinar is a great place to start. If you missed the webinar visit the website at http://sites.google.com/site/summertimeurpln/ . Start by working through each of the links at the left, stage one do the suggested reading. You'll be on your way to a great PLN. You can add me to your PLN: http://www.twitter.com/bthat. I have to admit that I'm not all that exciting but check out who I follow. Some of the best in education and web 2.0.