Back to school…

Well the summer holidays are over and here in the UK we are back to school this week for a new academic year.

This is a brief post to say how helpful I have just found the Flickr resource. We are doing some short work on settings, as do most year groups, and I found myself some belting pictures courtesy of the Flickr community. Some of us may not be able to use Flickr in schools but we can still take advantage of the excellent photographic resource that it is.

So I searched for things like “moonlight” and “road” as we are focusing on The Highwayman and there are some great images. A few tips to help you get started with your search:

1. My number one tip has to be to filter your search to only include Creative Commons licensed images where you have permission to download and use the images from the owner. Next to the search button click on “Advanced Search” and scroll down to the Creative Commons options at the bottom of the page, checking what you need.
2. Once you have a set of results, filter them according to “Most Interesting” to give you a set of popular well constructed, interesting images.
3. Use the “Thumbnails” view to allow you to see lots of images to help you find what you want quicker.
4. If you find an interesting image take a look at the owners photostream, their set of images. You may discover other pictures of similar quality or versions of the one you liked.
5. Also search the “Groups” as these often collate images under one topic so a quick look for moonlight in groups comes up with a list of groups dedicated to the art of photographing the moon etc!! And this group which has some nice images in it.

This is one of my favourite images I found and we will be using this tomorrow for the kids to explore and add some sensory description to.

What do you think of it?