Image Resources on the Web

Finding Images on the Web for use by Educators

Although search engines such as Google.com and others enable you to quickly locate photos, clip art, and other visual media, most that is found is not in the public domain and so can only be used under very restricted ways without permission of their owners. This basically rules out their use in websites or in other media for public presentation. There are exceptions, and Fair Use statutes define the latitude that we enjoy in an educational setting. Of course, there is never any problem with either faculty or students using their own original images. Other images in the public domain (as from sources listed below) may be used, or more recently those projects that permission is defined as they are released to the public. An example of this is a new kind of copyright designation called "Creative Commons."

Copying Images

Right mouse click on the image in your browser you wish to save, and "Save Target to Desktop." This may be called something else in your browser. On a Mac, press the control button, click on the mouse, and select "Download Image to Disk."

Citing Examples

MLA Example

van Gogh, Vincent. The Starry Night. 1889. Museum of Mod. Art,
New York. 3 Feb. 2003 http://moma.org/collection/depts/paint_sculpt/blowups/paint_sculpt_003.html

APA Example

Hogarth, William. The Graham Children. 1742. The National Gallery, London. 26. Aug. 2004 http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/cgi-bin/WebObjects.dll/CollectionPublisher.woa/wa/work?workNumber=ng4756

Example sites:

TCC's Multimedia Link Site
http://del.icio.us/TCC_Multimedia

Creative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/find/
Full copyright applies to most stuff on the web. But the Creative Commons search engine finds photos, music, text, and other works whose authors want you to re-use it for some uses -- without having to pay or ask permission.

FreeFoto.com
http://www.FreeFoto.com/
FreeFoto.com is the largest collections of free photographs for private non-commercial use on the Internet. The photographs are free to private non-commercial users and for sale to other users. FreeFoto.com contains over 40,000 images with new pictures being added every week.

GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program)
http://gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE/
This site offers 32,000 free public domain images and encourages visitors to help index the images with suggestions for keywords. I can imagine a similar solution for our own regional historical image archive whereby site visitors could submit online not only keywords but further personal information that they know of related to a picture. Type your subject in "Key Search".

Wikipedia: Online Encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources
Wikipedia is a good source of images donated to the cause of building a free encyclopedia. Also includes links to other public domain image resources. There is also a huge list there of public domain resources.

Historical Image Resources
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html
The Selected Civil War Photographs Collection contains 1,118 photographs. Most of the images were made under the supervision of Mathew B. Brady, and include scenes of military personnel, preparations for battle, and battle after-effects. The collection also includes portraits of both Confederate and Union officers, and a selection of enlisted men.

NYPL's Picture Collection
http://digital.nypl.org/mmpco
The New York Public Library has launched the Picture Collection Online, an image resource site for those who seek knowledge and inspiration from visual materials. It is a collection of 30,000 digitized images from books, magazines and newspapers as well as original photographs, prints and postcards, mostly created before 1923.

National Geographic
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/siteindex/photogallery/
Famed magazine has online archives of images. Everything here is covered under "fair use" rules for education.

Ad*Access
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/adaccess
Images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in US.

Google Voice Can Save Students Money

What is Google Voice? Google Voice is the Internet based phone forwarding service by Google. Google Voice is free except for international calls.

Google Voice gives you a separate phone number which you can give out as if it is your regular phone number. You can then change your settings to have calls forward to any of your phones.

You can forward to one group of phones during the day and another at night. You can have calls from certain numbers forward differently than calls to other numbers. You can block spamming callers and send some calls straight to voice mail.

You can send yourself an SMS message or an email whenever you get a voice mail message, and you can check your voice mail from the Web or from your phone. Any calls that go to voicemail are transcribed into an email and sent to your Gmail account along with an attached recording of the original message.

Google Voice will let you define which phones ring, based on who's calling, and even let you listen in on voicemail before answering the call. They use smart technology to route your calls. So, if you're already on a Google Voice call, they will recognize it and use call waiting to reach you on the phone you're on.

Tips for Students. Heading off to college usually means packing up the car and saying goodbye to your family and friends, so the Google Voice team put together a bunch of ways to make it cheaper and easier to stay in touch while you're on campus. They also thought back to their own days living in dorms and cramming in the library to create a list of student-friendly tips for getting the most out of your phone while you're away at school.

1. Save your money for something better than minutes

• Send unlimited text messages for free--from your phone or the web
• Make free long distance calls in the US and to Canada with Gmail
• Call friends studying abroad or call home if you're an international student for as little as 2 cents/minute
  

2. Use your phone the way you actually want to

• Setup a free Google Voice number that will ring all of your phones at once (dorm phone, cell phone, Gmail, etc.) so you never miss a call (a number that stays with you even if you forget to pay your bill or change cell phone provider)
• Get voicemail transcriptions via email and text during class
• Enable do not disturb to send your calls directly to voicemail when you want to sleep in on the weekends or need to get some studying done
  

3. Make calls when your phone can't
Calling in Gmail makes it possible to call phones from right inside of your Gmail account. This makes a super handy alternative to your mobile phone for things like:

• Calling from dorm rooms with non-existent cell phone reception
• Locating a mobile phone that is buried in the couch
• Ordering a pizza when your phone battery is dead
  

Mythbusting the DE Numbers

When I first started working here in July of 2009, I had some instructors tell me that there was a 30 to 40 percent difference in the success and retention rates between face-to-face and online classes at this campus. This was after I had been talking about studies that show no statistical difference (+ or - 5%). Many of these studies are found on the "No Significant Difference" website.

I talked to Zach DeLoach in Institutional Research and he found a steady 10% difference and said "that while the DE Success and Retention are lower than the Classroom Sections and the Overall figures, there is strong correlation between them. As the College Course Retention has gone up, so has the DE
Course Retention. As the College Course Success has remained flat, so has the DE Course Success."


I believe that as we develop our online college, and more instructors learn about how to use online tools effectively for communication and collaboration that we will see these numbers move even closer together.

Distance Ed Advising

Students in the online college have Barry Tucker as their distance education advisor. Whether students hope to take most of their degree programs online or only a few courses, they will want to be sure to speak with an advisor about their plans. Those students who plan to regularly take two or more classes online each term will be assigned to a special online program advisor, Barry Tucker, who works with students via the phone, email, and webconferencing (CCC Confer). Student always have access to an advisor for the one-on-one support they need.

Our philosophy at College of the Redwoods is that any service students can get face-to-face, they can get online. One of the services that can help ensure student success in education advising. How do students know if they are taking the classes they need? How can they be sure that classes they are taking will lead to a degree, a transfer to another college or help them with their professional goals? These are just some of the questions an advisor can help with.

Please refer students to Barry Tucker at 707.476.4156 or by email: barry-tucker@redwoods.edu.

Sakai 3: Social Media meets Online Learning

Sakai 3 will be the next iteration of Sakai’s collaborative learning environment. It is meant to be more than just a change of tools, but an evolution of the collaborative philosophy that will include social networking and web 2.0 tools

Sakai 3 looks to extend the definition of a course site to communities like Facebook, Myspace, or linked in. According to the Sakai whitepaper (linked below), “The incorporation of Social Networking into Sakai...will enable new models of interaction among users of the Collaboration and Learning Environment, in a manner suitable for academic work, but will also facilitate collaboration among Sakai institutions in which the members of a network at a trusted partner institution can be given access to the network(s) of a Sakai adopting school for research, learning, and the formation of peer groups of many kinds.”

Content creation and organization will be easier in Sakai 3. Google Docs has raised the bar as to what students and teachers expect in document creation and sharing online. “Content owners can organize content in a variety of ways and make it available to various users, groups and sites as they see fit. Instead of the site’s content we will think about the user’s content or a group’s content, both content they own and content they have access to.”

You can learn more about Sakai 3 by reading the white paper from the Sakai Foundation.

Adding NanoGong to a MyCR Course Site

NanoGong is an applet embedded in a web page that can be used by students and faculty to record, playback and save voice recordings. When the recording is played back, the user can speed up or slow down the sound without changing it. The sped-up or slowed-down version of the recorded sound can be saved to the user's hard disk, if he/she wishes.

Students can use this applet to easily record voice and save the file on their computer and then upload the recording to an assignment.

There are special features for those not afraid of tinkering with HTML, such as the ability to show or hide parts of the NanoGong interface.

The NanoGong applet has been released as a free open source project.

To use the applet:

1. Copy this URL: http://mycr.redwoods.edu/access/content/user/dfiore392/Share/NanoGong/
2. Log-in to your class and click on "Site Editor"
3. Click on "Edit Tools"
4. Click on the "Web Content" check box and then click on "Continue"
5. In the "Title" field, type "Nanogong"
6. Paste the URL into the "source" field 7. Click on "Continue" and then "Finish"
   

This will put a link to the NanoGong applet in your course Project Tools.

Contact Geoff Cain at x4305 or by email for assistance or example assignments.

What is Google Docs?

MyCR is now integrated with Google Docs. Google Docs is basically an online "office suite," an easy-to-use word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor that enables you and your students to create, store and share documents instantly and securely, and collaborate online in real time. Students and can create new documents from scratch or upload existing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. There is no software to download, and all work is stored safely online and can be accessed from any computer.

When MyCR is updated to Sakai 2.7, students and faculty will be able to access Google Docs through the "Resources" and "Drop Box" tools.

Google Docs' sharing features enable you and your students to decide exactly who can access and edit documents. Instructors will find that Google Docs helps promote group work and peer editing skills. In creating Google Docs, Google was guided by the goals of The National Council of Teachers of English, which espouses writing as a process and encourages multiple revisions and peer editing.

Through the revisions history, instructors can see clearly who contributed to what assignment and when; if a student says he or she worked on a given project over the last two weeks, it will be documented (no more "dog ate my homework" excuses). Instructors and peer reviewers can insert comments and then follow up to see how the student changed a document in later drafts

Students will find that Google Docs can help them stay organized and keep on top of their assignments. They never have to remember to save their work; it happens automatically. It's easy to collaborate online with fellow students, even when they aren't in the same place, and they can get feedback easily from teachers, parents, relatives and tutors, and enter updates anytime from anywhere.

Resources for Teachers

• Overview for Educators (presentation)
• Google Docs: The Basics
• Google Docs: Tips and Tricks