Three Good Places to Find Historical Images - And an Idea for Using Them to Spark Discussion

One of my favorite ways to spark students' interest in a history lesson is to have them look for interesting historical images. I've found that interesting images can prompt good conversations which in turn lead to good questions for my students to research the answers to. One of the ways that I've carried out those activities over the years is by having students look through digital archives of images and then sharing their favorite images on a Padlet wall. Along with the image I ask students to share a question that they have about it. Here are three good places to find historical images.

My go-to source for years has been The Commons on Flickr. The Commons contains more than one million historical images that are in the public domain. Dozens of libraries and museums around the world have contributed to The Commons. When you find a picture on The Commons, look for the download arrow icon in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Click that arrow and you can choose from a variety of image sizes to download.

The Museum of New Zealand recently released more than 30,000 images of art and artifacts to download and re-use for free. The images are a mix of public domain images and images labeled with a Creative Commons license. The museum makes it easy to determine how an image is licensed. To determine the licensing of an image simply click on the download button and the next page clearly shows the license for the image.

Use the Getty Search Gateway to search through more than 85,000 images in the Getty Museum's Open Content Program. The Getty Search Gateway allows you to filter your search according to material type, topic, name, source, and location. Once you find an image, click the image's title to be taken to its landing page where you can learn more about it, get the required attribution information, and learn more about the history of your chosen image.

Haiku Deck Explains the World Cup - And How to Embed Haiku Deck Presentations

Yesterday, I shared Common Craft's explanation of everything you need to know about the game of soccer. Today, the Haiku Deck blog featured a presentation of everything you need to know about the World Cup. The presentation includes a list of the contending countries and explanations of how the tournament is conducted. The slides also feature images of the stadiums used during the tournament. If you're like me and you don't understand how the World Cup works, check out the presentation as embedded below.


Everything You Need to Know About the World Cup - Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires

I've had a few people email me over the last couple of months asking how to embed Haiku Deck presentation. At some point in the last six months Haiku Deck changed where the embed code for presentations is found. In the past it was found on the last slide of a deck, much like on SlideShare. When that option disappeared it seemed like Haiku Decks that you didn't own could not be embedded. The trick to finding the embed code is to hover your cursor over the "+" symbol to the left of the slides then click on the "< >" icon that appears. Clicking on that icon will give you an embed code for any Haiku Deck presentation that has been made public on the web. I made a short screencast of the process and embedded it below.