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This site offers thousands of free pictures that are categorized so you can easily find the image you are looking for. Here are some of the examples of categories you will find on this site: home living, nature, cooking, business, animals, backgrounds, and textures. Within each main category group, the site breaks the groups into more specific categories.
Since the majority of the students I work with as a SLP range in age from 4 to 7 I often find myself needing pictures of common objects to include in my lessons when increasing vocabulary and teaching the concept of categories. This is especially important when working with students who do not only exhibit a language impairment but are also learning English as second language. This site is incredibly useful to me because I have numerous pictures available at my fingertips.

One possible problem with this site is that the pictures are very basic. While this is best for the students I work with, these pictures may not be useful for all students. Also, there is no way to filter what images may appear in each group. While I presume there are no inappropriate pictures, there is no way to ensure this. I feel comfortable using this site however because my students will not be using the site directly be themselves. Anything I retrieve from the site will be done prior to the lesson to reduce the risk of inappropriate pictures popping up.

This website is of the form of a blog. The material itself is a collection of royalty-free photos. Mostly, I could see these photos reaching a mature level of students in grades 9-12. I also think that these students would have a less difficult time finding resources that they would actually be able to incorporate it into an educational setting. The photos on photos8.com are priced at $5 each. The quality of the work that can be found through categories and sub-categories are well worth the price.

Thousands of copyright free and copyright friendly images and photos for teachers and students. This site contains different categories of pictures. The rights belong to the owners of the pictures. Students and teachers are free to use the pictures for projects, teaching, posters, multimedia and educational purpose. This site also contains ideas, trading posts, activities and other resources for teachers and students. Latina

Pcs4 Learning is designed for education and is "copyright friendly" and searchable. It contains five popular categories, animals, food, education, space, and countries. Click on collections, however, and plethora of other categories appear. Click on the lesson plans link and teachers will find ideas for using pictures in lesson plans. A small sample of the lessons that appear includes symmetry, alliteration and ancient cultures. The pictures on this website have been donated by educators, students, and amateur photographers. Images here are suitable for grades k-12, any subject.

OpenPhoto is a free source of stock photos that only require attribution. The photos are searchable and span many organized categories. Some of the photos are high quality, and others aren't quite what I'd call HD, but it's fairly easy to track down what you need. I see no reason why middle school and high school students couldn't use this site. Anytime they needed a picture for a PowerPoint or some other project they were working on, I could direct them to this site to get great photos that are easily attributed to the creators thanks to handy copy and paste instructions on the individual photo's site. I don't see many issues arising with this one. I'm hoping everything here is clean (haven't searched too deeply to ensure it's all school appropriate). Overall, it looks like an easy way to find pictures to add to presentations, projects, and other activities without infringing on copyright.

Cepolina offers free photos from Europe, America, India and China. The site offers over 1400 categories to choose from. The photos available can be used for any grade level in any subject. The site is very easy to navigate and offers very detailed descriptions of photo categories.  I think any educator would enjoy the international collection of photos and finding ways to incorporate them into class lessons.  

Unpround is a very unique site that offers free images. There is not a designated category assignment, however all photos are grouped by color. The site could be used for any grade level and photos can be applied to any subject.  The only difficulty I would see in using this site would be the unusual organization.  We are used to category names and subject groupings.  There is a search box available, so the site user could simply enter a search term.  

This site is more functional than the other two I posted. One of the unique features is its large collection. There are not only objects (photos or illustrations) but also materials/textures available. Another feature is that they have some pull-down menus to narrow down the search. We can select the images by the topic (animal, architectures, etc), dominant colors of the image we want, the number of items we want to see at once, etc. These functions meet the users' needs. The site also asks for donations of the images. The challenge might be the filter set by the districts. Almost all the time this is the case some teachers are discouraged. It is strongly recommended teachers check this site on a school computer before the intended use. If blocked, requesting unblocking may be the next thing to do. Furthermore, as a school or department it may be a good idea to secure several online repositories that are not blocked; therefore, any teachers can use at any time safely for educational purposes. Lesson Example: 3rd grade and above in Visual Arts Direction: In our life there are many signs. Common features of those signs are simplicity (restricted numbers of colors, shapes, lines, etc.) and clearness of a message (directly represented by an object). Suppose you are a professional illustrator and the city has asked you to create a symbol/sign useful to the community. Make sure to provide good reasons to back up your creation. (Ex. how your creation will promote the welfare of the city, reduce the crimes, or promote business, etc.) Search the needs of the city so that your creation is timely and meets the needs of the city. Save the resources. Image citation: Dario sign no baby carriages warning lift. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.imageafter.com/image.php?image=b17dario103.jpg

PD Photo is a website that has a large collection of photos that are free and available for use under the public domain. There looks to hundreds of photos that fall under a variety of categories. Many photos are available for geography use and would be beneficial in a social studies classroom; there are also many images that can be used in a science classroom, like the Macros or Plants category. The images on this site are not limited to these two content areas as there are plenty of ways students and teachers can use these photos in an educational setting, for any and all grade levels.

This image repository offers a wide variety of categories. The categories are listed at the top of the home page and are easy to navigate. Most of the photos offered are by amateurs free of charge. This repository requests that users give credit for images by providing a link. This could be best used with middle and high school students. It could also be a great source for middle school social studies students and teachers as the topics are organized by continents. Big Foto offers a great source of images that are neatly organized and easy to find.

Photogen offers free images for commercial and personal use. There is no sign up or registration to download images. The images can be found through the direct search option or under the categories section on the homepage. It offers a wide range of categories of images. This site could be used for upper elementary, middle, and high school students in any content area. This site is easy to navigate and the images download in seconds. The only concern is that the homepage contains ads for other free image repositories that could confuse students and take them to another site. This issue could be fixed with having a 'teachable moment' students about internet advertising.

Users of resources found on this site are advised to read the terms of use page - there are some use restrictions. See here: http://www.photogen.com/terms-of-use/

This a great website for students of all ages to use is it holds a wide variety of photos. It is functions just like wikipedia users can add their own content to the directory. The best feature about this site is the images are seperated into categories, for example a search on fire seperates the images into additional categories, fire, fire making, fire fighter etc. If an image is not in the directory then the site provides a definition of the word. The wiki media commons also has a selection of audio and video footage available for users to download. The only negative about the site will be making sure the students are not distracted by the language tabs on the page. Users of this resource are advised to read the terms of use details, which can be found on this page: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reusing_content_outside_Wikimedia

In completing a work-related project, I found some great sites that assist educators in locating open educational resources. The Orange Grove Digital Repository is one of those resources. If you have not used it before, it is a repository of instructional resources. It can be integrated with a Learning Management System and educators can import resources directly from a teacher's LMS. The collection of resources consists of open textbooks and open courseware. There are resources for higher education and K -12, both of which contain categories that are easy to navigate. Among the available content: videos, presentations, audio, spreadsheets, syllabi, assessments, and images.

WPClipart is a collection of images for students and others that is free of copyright concerns as well as safe from inappropriate images. There are currently 50,526 images on the site. I can see students in grades K-12 using this resource. The site is easy to navigate and search for images. There are tons of categories such as medical images, geography images, historical figure images, computer images, and on and on which is why I see this being helpful to all students grades K-12 and all subjects. Unlike some clipart sites, there are images on this site that are not cartoon like making them better for older students. According to the terms and conditions, the site is Public Domain and the images can be used and edited. No direct user-uploaded images are allowed. The only concern I see is that this site is trying to get donations through PayPal which I haven't seen on other sites.

This online database contains very high-quality "Public Domain," "Copyright-Free" photographs that are easily accessible from 10 different category divisions on the "Gallery Index" page; Abstract, Architecture & Cityscapes, Food & Drinks, Industrial & Machinery, Miscellaneous, Nature, Sports & Recreation, Technology, Textures & Backgrounds, and Travel. In the "Terms of Use" statements, the creators state that "Picdrome.com is a growing Public Domain digital photography collection, free of copyright and licensed under Creative Commons…all images are free to download for personal, educational and commercial use, without restriction." They also advise users to check the "Disclaimer" statement link regarding any additional licenses; however, in the disclaimer statement there didn't appear to be any other restrictions listed. Students in upper Elementary school through High school would be able to easily navigate and download these photographs that were relevant to project work they were completing. For example, my Middle School students would greatly benefit from the close-up photos of food from all of the food groups in this repository, when they complete "Family & Consumer Science" class projects that present visual examples of nutritionally balanced menus. The only problematic portion of the website is the banner advertisement located directly below the title/search box and right above the category links…it often advertises products and sites that require purchasing but, the banner looks so much like the website heading that it is easily clicked on by "mistake." Educators would need to forewarn students of this obstacle before giving them free reign of the site's valuable images.