Aren’t you abundantly thankful—fellow science professor–that you don’t teach accounting or finance classes? Those are fine disciplines, we’re sure. However, they don’t have nearly the array of inspiring nature-based images available for teaching that we have in science. Some people might get chills looking a supply & demand graphs, but we most definitely do not. Instead, images and videos help illustrate to students that science is first and foremost an observational enterprise. Better still, nature is… beautiful!
Let’s start with the question of where to find pictures, images, illustrations, animations, and movies before we discuss how to use them most effectively. The problem here is not that there are insufficient visual resources available for teaching. On the contrary, there are far too many available and the vast array can be as overwhelming for students as it is for us! The question is not what, but which?
Rules of Fair Use, NonCommercial-ShareAlike CC BY-NC-SA
As a seemingly unrelated story, consider people trying desperately to follow a successful diet in order to lose weight. Weight loss is straightforward in theory: Weight loss occurs when more calories are burned in the course of a day than consumed. As told to us again and again by our elders, the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference. What doesn’t work when is simply to try to power through life knowing you should eat carrots instead of burritos for lunch. What the nutrition researchers tell us is that a dieter’s most successful strategy in this case is to eliminate options. In other words, the most successful dieters pick five healthy meals they like to eat and eat only those meals, no options. If you go off the path and try something new, that’s the first step to falling off your diet. This doesn’t sound appealing, and it’s not, but it works.
Let’s apply this same notion to finding pictures to help your students learn science. Just like there are at least 36 different hammers in the tool section of your local hardware store, there are at least 36 different places to find that perfect image of a wildflower for your PPT. I myself have embarrassingly spent hours and hours and hours looking for just the single, perfect image to illustrate a concept to students. Hours and hours for a single ideal image. Really. I beg you; do not fall into the timeless black hole of endlessly searching for the perfect image. Instead, adopt the dieter’s approach and painfully limit the number of places you’ll look for an image to five online repositories. You can choose to look at more places, but at your own peril.
To re-emphasize, probably any five resource repositories will do and anything past that is just gluttonous. To avoid the copyright infringement minefield, it is best to use things from .gov sites or from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page or, even better, from your textbook publisher’s website textbook instructor’s companion support site – they spend a fortune getting the rights to use photos and you should avail yourself of that effort! You need to remember that just because it is on the Internet, especially if it comes from a .edu or a .com site, doesn’t mean it is free for you to use as an educator, and the archaic rules covering this can be complicated—and to be honest, you are too busy to care deeply.
Public Domain image from the Space Telescope Science Institute
Regardless, any you go to a tax-dollar supported image repository, look for links to “Top 10” or “Heritage Collection” or “Greatest Hits” or “Anniversary Images” to find that particular sites’ most popular images without being overwhelmed. Press-release pages are also a really great place to look. Again, be aware that some images are copyrighted, and only some exist in the public domain, but most are available for “fair use” for limited educational purposes. Your first-tier approach to avoiding legal violations is to always note on your PPT the precise web address where the image came from so that your presentations model how to students can avoid plagiarism. The second-tier infringement avoidance approach is that if a particular individual’s name is credited with the image and it looks like someone might have taken it purposefully to be artsy, tread carefully here to avoid copyright problems.
Tim Slater, University of Wyoming, Tim@CAPERteam.com
Suggested citation: Slater, T. F. (2018, November). Finding the best images for my PPT-lectures. Society of College Science Teachers Blog, 4(4), https://www.scst.org/blog
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