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Boasting thousands of digital clip art images, Openclipart does cater to teachers and other working professionals. The collections are sorted for optimum utility. The best part is that the images are all copyright-free and in the public domain, which means that there are no restrictions. There are no perceived limits on usage; resources should be suitable for K-12 and beyond, and useful for Digital stories, Prezis, PowerPoint, imbedding in other virtual documents, and educational websites. Potential Solutions to Perceived Problems: The problems lie not with the photo repositories themselves, but rather lie in the educator's own ability to think creatively, and to work with raw digital materials. I can think of no better solution than for an educator to spend time examining how the available resources can be used to encourage a student to think about the subject matter. A teacher can plan for an elaborate lesson but discover there is a dearth of photo content; therefore, since time and money are not unlimited, the teacher would be wise to consider this before planning a lesson. Further, a teacher would be wise to search for as many resources as possible and add them to a list, as we have done for this assignment. Quality: B If you are looking for good clip art for no money, and with no restrictions, this collection seems much better than anything you will find packaged with a Microsoft product.

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.

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.

Motion Elements provides some nice background stock footage, some computer generated background footage and some title imagery. Examining the site in closer detail, I would describe the target audience for this site to be fairly universal. While scanning through the vast offerings I did not see any content that I would deem "inappropriate". I would suggest, however, that older students have an easier time with the general concept of video production that younger students, so this site may benefit them more. The free videos are of very good quality, but there are only about 5 pages of them. If you want to diversify your options, then videos can cost from $20 to $50, so I would stay with the free ones. One the plus side, the free clips do contain high definition (HD) content. If they have something you can use, you will be highly pleased with the quality. From a technical standpoint, the video clips that I downloaded to try were all in .mov format. .mov is an extension associated with Apple and its QuickTime platform, so use of these clip on Apple products, Macs for example, is certainly possible. However, I was able to easily add downloaded clips into Windows Movie Maker for editing as well with absolutely no hiccups, whatsoever. This means that not only will teachers and students benefit from easily downloaded clips covering a vast variety of subjects, they should have no difficulty using the clips on any computer platform they may be limited to in their educational setting.

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.

Discover Yale Digital Content's site contains images from Yale's museum collections. The site describes itself as "a way to search across Yale's collections of art, natural history, books, and maps, as well as photos, audio, and video documenting people, places, and events that form part of Yale's institutional identity and contribution to scholarship." Often literature is intimately connected to history and historical events, art work, geography, etc. Using these images can help students form connections with the time in which a particular work of literature was written, helping to deepen their knowledge.  Discover Yale's copyright policy: "The mission of Yale University is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge. Increasingly, this knowledge is in digital form. The Discover Yale Digital Content site is intended to promote discovery of digital content from across the University. Yale's policy on open access to digital representations of works in the public domain from museum, library, and archive collections is a commitment to provide unrestricted access to such content as it becomes available through normal work practices. Yale University will not restrict use of items digitized from its museums, libraries and archives collections which have been made openly available through the University's electronic interfaces, and which are no longer under copyright, except where other rights or restrictions apply."

Offers digital photos of cars organized by make and model. The car pictures are of reasonably good quality. This could potentially be suitable for high school or college automotive classes, economics classes, or even environmental science classes. The resources could be used in Digital stories, Prezi, and PowerPoints. They could be imbedded in other virtual documents, or Educational websites, provided the licensing agreement was followed. The photos are royalty-free and there are no fees. Potential Problems and solutions: The problems lie not with the photo repositories themselves, but rather lie in the educator's own ability to think creatively, and to work with raw digital materials. I can think of no better solution than for an educator to spend time examining how the available resources can be used to encourage a student to think about the subject matter. A teacher can plan for an elaborate lesson but discover there is a dearth of photo content; therefore, since time and money are not unlimited, the teacher would be wise to consider this before planning a lesson. Further, a teacher would be wise to search for as many resources as possible and add them to a list, as we have done for this assignment. Quality: B All viewed photos are of good quality, though they tend to vary in resolution. Using such images may require a bit of creativity.

Musopen is a 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on improving access and exposure to music by creating free resources and educational materials. They provide recordings,sheet music and textbooks to the public for free, without copyright restrictions. Their mission is to "set music free". At Musopen, they obtain recordings of public domain music that have no copyrights so that visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music. Most of the music is of classical piano or symphony pieces. Clips can be searched by Composer, Performer, Instrument, Period or Form. Downloading clips requires users to have an account, which is free. The audience for this site is open ended. Anyone from Elementary School students to the oldest of the population can easily discover music which can be used in any project they wish. It is very easy to search and download the .mp3 version of the music for use in project creation. The quality of the offerings it is excellent. Additionally, being Classical in nature, they do not "get in the way" of an overall project. This is extraordinarily beneficial if using the music as a background piece. This blessing is also the limitation; you do not have a wide range of genres from which to choose. If you want something outside the Classical field, you should investigate other free-music sites. To test this resource, I created a test podcast with the free application Audacity in which I spoke into a microphone to record my voice. I was then able to add a piece from this site as background music for the podcast. It worked very well. Teachers and students will find this to be just one of the many uses for music from this site. It is appropriate for similar presentations whether they be Prezi productions or videos published on YouTube-type sites. The only limitation is the range of possible music styles. If a classical piece is your preferred choice, however, Musopen is a wonderful site to visit

Download royalty free music for use in films, YouTube, and other projects, with no copyright restrictions.

Beautifully rendered digital content including clipart, photos, fonts, templates, illustrations and more appropriate for student view and use but best suited to a teacher's purposes e.g. avatars for student labels or images for multimedia presentations. While the majority of materials on this site are not free, they DO offer free goods from featured artists every week! No membership fee is required. Content outside of the weekly features does cost money, but patrons are directly supporting, "independent creatives around the world," and are granted Creative Market's simple license with every purchase, the details of which can be found here: https://creativemarket.com/licenses/simple. Additionally, it is important to note that in certain cases, "portions of some products may be covered by an open source software license such as the GPL (GNU General Public License). In these cases, any portions of the product not covered by an open source license will be covered by this license."

This resource specializes in stock footage from around the world. All of the video clips are free to download and to use. There is no subscription or user login required in order to use the footage. This feature makes it ideal to use for educators looking to provide their students with a ready source of footage that they can use for their multimedia presentations. Students interested in media production and editing could create some fantastic presentations, especially if they have access to editing software and a green screen. The more advanced applications of the video clips could be used by high school students, but I could also see middle school aged students utilizing various clips to help with creating presentations for World History or Biology classes. For example, in my 7th grade Life Science class we do a project on the biomes of the world. Students could use the video files from the "Animal Footage" section to incorporate dynamic visuals into their reports. Students could also use footage from different continents to visually identify the various biomes for the class. Modeling of how to download, edit and embed the videos would be necessary to ensure that the students experience success with this resource, but that is just a matter of scheduling instruction time prior to the final projects being completed. The website is very easy to navigate and all clips are easily imported into any editing platforms. This feature makes it easy to use for educators who may have a variety of software on their school computers, depending on which school system they work in.

To use resources from this site, you will be required to pay an annual fee - at the time of this entry, $25.

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

This site is a public site that allows users to upload their own pictures they want to donate. All pictures are free and are copyright free. Pictures can be used for private or commercial use. Pictures are categorized into groups according to the topic of the photo. This site would be a great site to use with students because the pictures are taken by other amateurs, perhaps students. There is a large variety of pictures to pick from so students could create a power point, digital story, digital poster, or even video to name a few with these pictures. This site could be used for any academic area since there is a wide selection of pictures to choose from. Students and teachers could even add their own photos to the site so that others can use them for their projects. As a SLP, I would benefit from using these photos to help students develop language skills. Students could easily be presented with a picture daily and answer questions/describe the picture. I definitely plan to use this site in the future. One possible problem with this site is that there is no way of monitoring what type of photos may appear under a specific category. I searched the site for several minutes and only came across one photo that may be questionable for younger students. However, this site could easily be used with younger students with teacher assistance. I feel that the advantages of this site definitely outweigh the possible disadvantages.

Please note the following statement on the home page: "...please be aware that some photos do require a model or property release."

Public Domain Photos contains both photos and clipart, and has several thousand of each that are in the public domain. While there are literally thousands to choose from, the search feature on the site isn't that great, and the organization of the images and clipart could be better. For example, if you do a search for 'wonton soup', it returns no results and only show professional images that link to shuttershock, which is subscription based. If you do a search on for 'wonton', it will return a few images from the free images on the site. If you can get past the hurdle of flipping through page after page within a specific category to find what you need, you will find tons of images that both you and your students can use, and lots of clipart options as well. All grade levels and all content areas can find useful images on this site, you just have to willing to sit and browse.

Photo laboratory - this is a collection of exclusive photo images of high resolution. You can download any stock image at no cost or buy photo under royalty-free licence. This is a great resource for middle and high school students who are making a website or any other fictitious marketing products and need some "real-looking" pictures to include but maybe do not have the time or resources to take the pictures themselves. I think this could be used for any subject area as they have a wide range of pictures including all types of people and objects. I think it would be especially useful in my business classes where my students are always wanting high quality photos for their projects. Directing them to this website would be a great alternative to searching Google which is their first "go-to" search engine. The thing that I liked the most about this site is that the pictures do not look fake. They look more like what you would actually take yourself so I think that would be a positive and a draw to get more students to use them.

Resources in this site are free for any non-commercial use. Commercial use requires fee payments. Users are directed to check the Legal page for specific details.

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/