Safe Image Searching for Vocabulary Words

An activity that I'd like my elementary students doing is searching for pictures that go with our vocabulary words. This is great for ELL's especially. My problem is that microsoft clipart is too limiting. Google images has a lot of questionable pictures.

For example, I was trying to teach the homophone "swell". I found a picture of a wave, someone feeling swell, and an arm that had swelled. There also were some graphic pictures of swollen body parts.

Does anyone have any suggestions for having the kids search for these images safely?

Tags: elementary, esl, safety, vocabulary

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Permalink Reply by Martha on August 11, 2008 at 12:55pm

How about pics4learning?

http://www.pics4learning.com/

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Permalink Reply by Chris G on August 11, 2008 at 2:16pm

Hey Stephanie, here is my delicious account, I have a bunch of free (royalty free) pics and are safe, but I still take caution when they are online looking for photos.

http://delicious.com/ohcanada1971/images

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Permalink Reply by Martha on August 11, 2008 at 2:40pm

I love this idea for reinforcing vocabulary, by the way.

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Permalink Reply by Nancy Bosch on August 11, 2008 at 3:39pm

You could have them draw the meanings and upload them to a "dictionary", then others could see them. You can use a digital camera to take pictures of the drawings or use a camera to take a picture of the vocabulary words.

Change of subject-- I have an idea using Moodle that allows students to upload favorite works of art, photos, animations, videos etc. The nice thing is with Moodle other people can comment and hopefully discussions would take place. If you didn't have access to Moodle or Blackboard you could use a program like studeous.com

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Permalink Reply by Colleen Brown on August 11, 2008 at 5:55pm

Thanks for the ideas! This is definitely something to post as a wiki with your kiddos.

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Permalink Reply by Mariam Raza on June 5, 2010 at 5:07pm

Nice ideas :) I was wondering if anyone found an online dictionary that lets you create custom vocabulary lists, and add pictures, and notes to each entry? Any help would be appreciated :)

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Permalink Reply by Faiza Khan on July 28, 2010 at 12:11pm

Mariam, you may want to check out http://VocabAhead.com You can create pictures using ToonDoo or hand drawn sketches or Voicethreads etc and upload it to the site. There are also over 1000 words with pictures and audios already on the site. And it is safe for school kids.

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Permalink Reply by Dana Cherrie on March 29, 2012 at 2:02am

Faiza, this looks llike a fabulous resource to use with students. I just spent a big chunk of time checking it out! Thanks for the "share"!

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Permalink Reply by Thomas E. Bieri on February 10, 2013 at 8:30pm

Faiza,

Thanks for the suggestions. I like the variety of methods for engaging the vocabulary. However, I am not sure if it has changed since you posted this or not because I haven't been able to discover a way to add words and pictures. If not, it might not work so well for my EFL students, although for my more advanced students in might be an interesting way for them to work on vocabulary they don't encounter enough to remember well. I like the video projects aspect, too.

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Permalink Reply by Denise Stewart on August 6, 2010 at 3:01pm

I work with beginning ELLs at the high school level and what I do is just use google images. I copy and save the images I need in a photo file (grouped by lesson content). Google now has all of Life Magazine's photos (going back to the 1800's) so finding great images is never a problem. In fact, this year I will be creating Prezi presentations (www.prezi.com) with many of them. I am am sure the kids will love this creative alternative to power points:)

Denise
www.ellteacherpros.com

www.teachingsuccesseswithells.blogspot.com