WOW: Inamge Abudance
I would like you to look for 3 sites that your can download clipart, images, drawings or any other digital artwork and post your findings to the Class Blog; wow: Image Abundance!!.
Two of the sites have to be free images of some type and one can be a pay by the month or week for use. Please give a short description of the site and how good it appears to you.
posted by CDK & Technology in the Classroom @ 12:17 AM
10 Comments:
As I was reading Chapter 2, I began to realize how much images and clipart play a role in webpage design. We do live in a visual world, and pictures truly are "worth a thousand words." It was also interesting to read about the differences between jpeg and gif. The 3 free image sites that I found all had images in the jpeg format. Reading about the different copyright laws for using images on the web made me cautious when looking for free images on the web. I think that I found three good sites that will be useful as I begin to design my webpage. The three sites and descriptions are below:
http://www.bigfoto.com
This site is free of charge and has the images categorized by countries and themes. There were some awesome photographs from around the world here. If used for a website, the user must provide a link to bigfot, and if used for a personal homepage, the user needs to ensure that the images are saved on their server. No "external links" to bigfoto pictures are allowed.
http://www.freeimages.co.uk/
This site also requires that the user includes a link to their commericial site if an image is being used. This site has a Keyword search to locate images. It was very user-friendly.
http://www.pics4learning.com
This site was probably my favorite, as it was developed for educators. It has copyright friendly images that can be used by students and teachers in an educational setting. I'm thinking about making my webpage, a class webpage for my 5th grade students. I think I'll be using this site a great deal!!!
I was fortunate enough to have taken a multimedia class last summer through Rita Hauck where I wrote a paper touching on GIF vs. JPEG so most of the terminology and concepts from this chapter were pretty understandable. There were 3 websites that I found that were good for clipart, images, etc.
The first one is the paid site which I use extensively at my school. Our entire district has a membership. It is http://schools.clipart.com. It has a lot of GIF as well as JPEG images that can be downloaded.
The next site was http://www.1clipart.com. This site was OK. It wasn't organzied that well, had a lot of popups, and mostly offered GIF images. But on the other hand, it was free.
Another neat site I found had a lot of animaged GIFs. It was http://www.prodraw.net. This was a very well organized site.
Website #1: Media Builder
URL: http://www.mediabuilder.com
Description: “Web tools to design/create/animate.” This site has quite a few free samples… really neat animated buttons and web elements. There is also a free sister-site to animate 3-D text and .gif images (HTML instructions included). Membership fees offer many more graphics and sets for web page design. Nice selection of high quality web elements. Parent site is Animation Factory.
Website #2: Pics 4 Learning
URL: http://pics.tech4learning.com
Description: “Copyright-friendly images for education.” This site has lots and lots of free photographs, illustrations, backgrounds, and images for use by teachers and students. Grouped into many different categories, teachers/students should be able to find something here for use in lessons, activities, or use in multimedia projects.
Website #3: Boogie Jack’s
URL: http://www.boogiejack.com/webmasters.html
Description: Huge webmaster section of this site for backgrounds, sound effects, and tutorials. Lots and lots of backgrounds, including web themed sets with buttons, banners, lines, etc. Plain layout is not indicative of what this site has to offer.
(Since I just noticed that there was another post for Pics 4 Learning, I have added another…)
Website #4: Dr. Ozone
URL: http://www.ozones.com/FTP/
Description: This is a direct link to Dr.O’s images free for download. Some are animated, some are not. Probably the best thing here is his selection of backgrounds and textures. (Textures come in handy when working with the fill option in text elements for web page use.)
www.theclipartsite.com
This site has 20,000 free clipart images. If you use their free clipart, you have to give them a link back, either on your home page or on the page you used the art.
www.school-clip-art.com
This is a huge site, with school related clip art. There is also sports clip art.
http://www.retrographix.com
Once you are there click on the index link. This is an unusual 1950s-era clip art site. Here is the information from the main page:
What is original fifties clipart?
Most communities in the fifties had small town print shops that doubled as printers of local news and advertising papers. These printers could not afford graphic artists so they used stock clipart supplied by large companies who distributed common graphics for use in advertising sections of the papers. They were provided for the printer in lots of categories to meet any advertiser’s needs. Hundreds more of these advertising "cuts" will soon be added.
I found 3 sites that looked pretty good and easy to use. All of them had a large variety of images to choose from.
1) www.freegraphics.com has the images categorized, linked, and rated. It includes photos, fonts, and templates that can be used.
2) www.pics4learning.com/ seems to be a popular site for students to use because of the copyright friendly images specifically for education. I noticed someone else mentioned this site also.
3) www.freefoto.com has a collection of free digital photographs for private non-commercial use. There is a fee if you want the highest quality images for internet use from this site.
http://www.clipart.com
This site is a cost site with tons of clips. Here are the costs.
1 Week of Clipart U.S. $15.95
3 Months of Clipart U.S. $59.95
6 Months of Clipart U.S. $99.95
1 Year of Clipart U.S. $169.95
http://www.clip-art.com
This is another website with the same name but different, if you look closely. This is a free site with over 100,000 graphics.
http://www.clipart-graphics.net
This site has not only many images but also links to other free sites.
Since I like “Free” I conducted an internet search for clipart with that particular feature. What I found was the “The Ring of Free Graphics” hub @ http://c.webring.com/hub?ring=graph. According to the website it contains “a collection of some of the best sites on the WWW that provide FREE graphics. It doesn't matter what kind of graphics (backgrounds, icons, clipart, buttons, etc) just as long as they are unique and FREE!”
For those of us who love horses and things associated with the “Wild West” Pleasure Gait Farms@ http://foxtrotters.tripod.com/ygraph.htm, is a fun site.
Another portal of sorts is located at http://www.freebyte.com/clipart_images_photos_icons/#animations. It has too many categories to mention and all are FREE. Under the “Free Animation” link I found the Animation library @ http://www.animationlibrary.com/a-l/. The website has over 13,729 free animations that can be used “on your website or be sent as digital postcards using their powerful Postcard Station.
The 3 that I found were free but had a lot of pop ups and seemed to make you jump through some hoops to get to that actual clip art. The first was www.free-graphics.com. This one would take you to free clip art but only after many pop ups and clicking on the correct link. The second one I found was www.barrysclipart.com. This was a server with several choices and also had pop ups. The third one was www.1clipart.com. This one seemed to be the easiest to get to the free clip art. It still had pop ups, but pretty much took you straight to the free stuff and did not route you somewhere else.
I chose three of the sites that my web development class used this past year.
1. www.flamingtext.com
This site was probably our favorite. IT has awesome text fonts and good clipart. It also has buttons that text can be added to and downloaded.
2. www.animation-central.com
A site with simple clip art or animated clip art that can be used to dress up a page or used to link pages.
3. www.animationjungle.com
A site we found toward the end of the year, but with many good categories of clip art choices.
I'm not a real fan of clipart, but one sight I found of traditional cartoon-like clipart was http://www.1clipart.com/ It had several pop-ups at first, but once those were closed, the sight worked pretty efficiently.
One of my favorites is the clipart selection from Microsoft http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/default.aspx?lc=en-us It has a nice combination of real photos and cartoon-like clipart. If you use Microsoft products often, it downloads into your accessible clipart folder.
http://classroomclipart.com/ This site has some really clear photos of scenery, microscopic pics, etc as well as traditional clipart. Nice variety and very easy to navigate and save images! All of the mentioned sites are free downloads.
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