Wellcome Library, London

Wellcome Images is a “free for education” library of remarkable life images (drawings, paintings, photographs). You’ll find a range of interesting images, everything from cellular photographs (micrographs) to historical artifacts to contemporary portraits. A search function and thematic grouping provide easy access to thousands of images.

Images are available under a liberal Creative Commons licence. This means that we can use them for educational purposes with attribution. Simply include a credit line with the copyright holder’s name.  Here is the part of the license agreement that pertains to teachers working on materials development for class:

All images with the credit line Wellcome Library, London are also available free of reproduction licence fees for the following uses: …
reproduction in teaching materials created in any medium by a teacher or lecturer at an educational establishment for the purposes of teaching. This includes making printed copies of such materials for students and promoting and making such teaching materials available in electronic form, for example, via a virtual learning environment.

TED is a great source for free videos of idea people sharing their extraordinary ideas at the annual TED conference. TED speakers are challenged to give the talk of their life in 18 minutes or less.

For advice on using them with your class, have a look at The Best ESL Teacher Resource for “TED Talks” by Larry Ferlazzo.

First, you’ll need the photos to be small. Small here refers to the file size, not the dimensions so much. There are many ways to do this, but here are two good options: (1) on the web, try Web Resizer to quickly resize your photos; (2) download Picasa (free software) from Google. Picasa works on Windows and newer Macs, and it’s a great way to view photos or even upload them to the Web for free. You can export a folder of pictures and it’ll resize them too (dimensions and file size) and they’ll still look really good on a computer.

Once you have a bunch of smallish photos (somewhere near 100-200 KB is a great size, nothing with MB), have a look at this a 30-second video from WordPress or follow the steps below:

• In your Dashboard, add a new page or post.
• Type in the title and below that click on the Add media star.
• On the From Computer tab, click on the Select Files button.
• Find your photos on your computer, flash drive, CD…
• Click on the first one and then hold down the Ctrl key (in Windows) and click on all the others you’d like to include. This selects multiple photos.
• Now click on the Open button and watch WordPress crunch them up.
• When it’s done, click on the Save all changes button at the bottom. At the top, click on the Gallery tab that appears.
• The default settings are probably fine, so at the bottom click on the Insert gallery button.
• You won’t be able to see your photos until you publish your post, so do that now by clicking on the blue Publish button.
• You can add captions to photos by editing them in the Media Library. Add your caption in Caption for each photo and Update.

Click on View post or Visit Site to see the final result. You’ll see a cropped version of each photo. Click on the photo to see the full-size image.

Notes:

• The Gallery is available only when you add new photos. There doesn’t seem to be a way to add photos already in the Media Library to a new Gallery.
• The Gallery looks better if you add this line of code to your custom style sheet (custom.css): #gallery-1 .gallery-item {width:auto !important;}

Privacy Changes on Facebook

Facebook has added more levels of privacy control recently. Their goal may be different from your goal in using FB. They would like you to share more and you may already be sharing more than you like. My goal is to give you a secure profile to start. From there, you can choose to open up parts of your profile as you see fit.

Friends only

Under Settings (blue menu at top), choose Privacy Settings. In Profile Information, set each section to Only Friends. For the Photo Albums section, click on Edit Settings. Set each album to Only Friends. Now each time you add new photos to Facebook, click on the lock symbol and check that the new album is set to Only Friends.

Now your profile is set up for Friends only. You may wish to have some sections and photo albums available to Friends of Friends and some available to Everyone on Facebook. Also, you can’t control which photos of your other people post but you can remove the tag that identifies you in the photo: click on “Remove Tag” beside your name. Now it’s not linked to your profile.

Back in Privacy Settings, you can do the same with Contact Information. You can control who can find you on Facebook here too. For example, an old high school friend searches for you on Facebook, finds your profile, and then adds you as a friend. For some this is great … for others, not so much.

Applications and Websites

For starters, don’t use applications that Facebook didn’t create. Applications can be created by anybody with basic programming experience. When you add an application, the creator has access to your entire profile. The application may have access to your friends’ walls and can post message there when you use the application. As of today, they’ll be able to send you e-mail too.

Edit the settings for What your friends can share about you. Uncheck everything. When a friend sends an invite to application you don’t care for, block it.

Now you can start considering which applications provide something worthy of trading your personal information. I know, I’m no fun when it comes to FB applications.

How Others See You

Facebook added a handy privacy feature as part of their Privacy Guide (http://www.facebook.com/privacy/explanation.php). Scroll down the page to How others see you and click on Everyone. That’s how everyone on Facebook and the Internet sees you. If you’re still sharing more than you’d like, go through the following post:

An excellent resource: 10 New Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know About

Jamendo is nicely divided into genres using tags. You can limit your search by country too. Lots of great tunes from all over the world available without need to sign up. Nice.

ccMixter has remixes and samples licensed under Creative Commons. You can remix the samples or create mash-ups from song samples. For example, you can download the acoustic guitar track from a song and you’ll hear only the guitar. Or, you could mash-up all the tracks except the vocals to create an instrumental version of a song. Fun but way too easy to get sucked in if all you need is a song for your student’s photostory.

On Kim Cofino’s Always Learning blog, Kim tells us how to make our presentations Zen-tastic! She provides strategies to locate the right images (copyright-free too), integrate a video, and use a minimum of text to create “eye-popping” presentations.

Photos for your class blog or website and music for your classroom video projects can be found easily using the Creative Commons search. The content is free to use without asking permission as long as you follow the simple conditions. Conditions vary, but usually it’s as simple as crediting the creator of the work.

Clipart

Microsoft Office Online has lots of clipart available to educational users with MS Office installed on their computers. Microsoft’s Clip Organizer is cumbersome, so instead, preview the clipart, click on “Bigger Preview”, and then use a very handy Firefox extension called Screengrab! to download the image.