Richard D. Solomon's Blog on Mentoring Jewish Students and Teachers: How Freefoto.com, a photo search engine whose images have a Creative Commons License, can be utilized to promote instruction in the blended learning classroom

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

How Freefoto.com, a photo search engine whose images have a Creative Commons License, can be utilized to promote instruction in the blended learning classroom

When mentoring our pre-service and in-service teachers we need to describe and model both research-based and clinically tested best practices, and demonstrate how these best practices can be applied in the real (i.e. physical) and virtual (i.e. online) classroom for both teaching and teacher training. The combination of face to face instruction in a physical setting and online learning is called blended learning. In this section of the blog we will describe how the internet can serve as a supplemental resource for instruction and the mentoring of pre-service and in-service Jewish educators. In this post we will discuss how FreeFoto.com, a photo search engine website, that allows the user to find copyright free or friendly Judaic (and other) images, can be used to promote instruction in the blended learning classroom.

Assumption: The teacher or mentor teacher has an interactive white board (i.e. SMART Board, Promethean, etc.), a Tablet PC (also called a Slate or Blade), a computer presenter or computer with internet access attached to an LCD projector in the classroom. It would be ideal if students or mentees had access to their own laptop computers or iPads. Given parental and school approval, and the development of specific guidelines, smartphones can be used to enhance instruction as well.

Note: Although Freefoto.com can be applied in the Judaic Studies blended learning classroom, it can be also be used for training pre-service and in-service Jewish educators for professional or staff development. It is our hope that Jewish educators around the globe will form an online community of practice, a CoP, a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession, to enhance the delivery of instruction and training of Jewish educators. For example, here is a CoP you might want to join.

Note: Freefoto.com can be used in a face to face and virtual classroom.

What is Freefoto.com?

FreeFoto.com is a photo search engine website that allows the user to find copyright free or friendly Judaic (and other) images. The photos on FreeFoto.com have a Creative Commons License.

According to Wikipedia a Creative Commons License (CC) a Creative Commons License is one “of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted work. A CC license is used when an author wants to give people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that they have created. CC provides an author flexibility (for example, they might choose to allow only non-commercial uses of their own work) and protects the people who use or redistribute an author's work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license by which the author distributes the work.”

Where is Freefoto.com located on the web?

http://www.freefoto.com/index.jsp

How Freefoto.com, a photo search engine whose images have a Creative Commons License, can be utilized to promote instruction in the blended learning classroom

Click on the links below to find resources that explain how Freefoto.com can be used to promote instruction in the face to face and virtual classroom:

On the next blogpost we will discuss how Freefoto.com, a photo search engine whose images have a Creative Commons License, can be utilized to promote Judaic instruction and to mentor/train Jewish educators.