SEARCH & DISCOVERY
Millions of digital resources are added to the web every day. The growing trend towards openness increases our choice of quality and varied resources that are suitable for a wide range of ages and subjects. While the possibility for teachers to explore individually chosen subjects varies, many may be constrained by a (national) curriculum. This means that teachers and educators are likely to browse online collections with a specific idea of what they are looking for.  

However, finding exactly what you want, and the ways in which it can be used, is often still time consuming. Portals that lead to the type of content you are interested in my be much more effective.

  • Locate primary sources to support study and research in different subjects. 
  • Find digital assets to use in multi-media projects and documents.
  • Effectively locate online media, including images video, audio, documents and presentations that support teaching and learning.
  • Bring together and curate content from diverse sources.
  • Share open content and resources using online spaces, platforms and communities.

This page is closely related to the Curation page which discusses how to improve finding relevant content to use for educational activities.  Finally a good understanding of Copyright is also invaluable when looking for and finding content.

Tools:
Creative Commons Search. This tool is favoured by courseware designers and developers looking for free, quality open content they can adapt. 

Flickr Creative Commons  provides data about all the images with a Creative Commons licence on Flickr.  It is arranged by licence type, includes a full licence description and, links to the lastest examples together with the latest count the number of images available under each of the the individual CC licences.

Wikiview is a powerful AI driven visual interface that searches the millions of Public Domain images in  the Wikimedia Commons database. Search filters include text colour or similar images.
Web searches; both Google Images and Bing Images include a number of settings and filters to customise your search. These include options to find images that have open licences.  They allow you reverse search or match images. Always set a Safe Search option for use in an educational context. That applies to any search tool. 

DuckGoGo  this browser/search tool wont store your search history meaning there’s nothing to sell to advertisers, it doesn’t collect or share any of you’re personal info. Also includes image search tools. Recommended for image search.

TinEye is a reverse search engine which can be used to discover where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. It is free for non commercial use. 

TinEye Multicolr If you're looking for images based on a specific colour or theme then this tool selects Flickr CC licenced images based on 1-5 colours of your choice.

searchbyimages.com another reverse image search tool.

Open Attribute a browser tool to make it easy for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution. for any CC licensed work.

Photos for Class searches Flickr and Pixabay for CC images and returns images with full attribution.

Further reading
A lists of resources for high-quality public domain photographs, together with tips for using the photos.

With more and more of the world's content online, it is critical that students understand how to effectively use web search to find quality sources appropriate to their task. Google have created a series of lessons to help you guide your students to use search meaningfully in their schoolwork and beyond.

Guide to using Reverse Image Search a detailed breakdown of various tools and techniques.

In progress
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