Over the years, I have spent a lot of time teaching my students how to avoid plagiarism. With what I have learned this week about copyright law, I can now teach them how to avoid copyright infringement as well. In order to do that, I need to become an expert in citing images. Therefore, I have been thinking of ways to borrow images from the internet and incorporate them into my own lessons while also giving proper credit where it is due.

I pulled this first image from Pixabay. It spoke to me because I recently read that one of the core values for ALA is sustainability, and it is the librarian’s responsibility to promote awareness of climate change and a sustainable future (Rubin & Rubin, 2020, p 673).

I would love to incorporate this beautiful image in a presentation to students about climate change and introduce practices we would follow in the library such as reducing, recycling, and repurposing our trash. What I love so much about this image is that it conveys the message that the world is in our hands. An image like this could further motivate students to research methods to reduce our library’s environmental footprint and initiate a student-led sustainability campaign for the school. 

I edited a similar image from Pixabay using Tuxpi, Pixap, and Pixlr. I added a famous quote from Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (Weir, 1989 ). The image had plenty of negative space for me to practice some of the strategies I have been reading in Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen Design (p.17). However, applying his advice about typeface was another struggle altogether. Reynolds mentions these go-to typefaces that are great for presentations (p.40), but the sites with which I practiced photo editing had a very small selection of fonts, most of which were not on his list. With that said, I am judging my favorite edits on personal preference, not Reynolds’ design expertise. 

Tuxbi was the simplest of the editing tools. I prefer it because the photo edit with the font I chose resembles a meme. Also, Tuxbi made it pretty easy for me to move the words around on the image, creating an angle that compliments the shape of the earth. I was also able to customize the line spacing which makes the words look better. Pixap, on the other hand, literally has the “meme feature” allowing you to convert any image into a meme. I would wager that my students would prefer Pizap for that reason along with the fact that it is user friendly and colorful. Pixlr was the least user friendly of the three, although graphic artists might appreciate it as the features resemble those of PaintShop Pro. Since my mission for this project was simple, I could not fully appreciate all of Pixlr’s sophisticated photo editing options. Nevertheless, any of these programs would be useful to incorporate in the classroom. Allowing secondary students to create their own edited images for a sustainability campaign would create a teachable moment in which students could learn about image licensing and how to appropriately cite images. You can compare the edits of the image with all three programs below.

References

Cocoparisienne. (2016). Hands-globe-earth-protection-1222866 [Illustration]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/hands-globe-earth-protection-1222866/ CC0

Mysticsartdesign. (2014). Natural-reserve-responsibility-world-480985 [Illustration]. Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/natural-reserve-responsibility-world-480985/ CC0

Reynolds, G. (2014). Presentation zen design (2nd ed.). New Riders.

Rubin, R. E., and Rubin, R. G. (2020). Foundations of library and information science (5th ed.). ALA Neal-Schuman. 

Weir, P. (Director). (1989). Dead Poets Society [Film]. Touchstone Pictures. Warner Bros.