Correctly Citing Pictures

I use pictures a lot while teaching English. I use them for vocabulary, as writing or speaking prompts and often just for fun. I'm an avid PowerPoint user for vocabulary review, but recently, one of my coworkers was talking about having the students create their own dictionary definitions online using images, videos, audio, and text.  We talked a lot about copyright, but realizing that neither of us knew much about it, we decided to work it out later.  This most recent lesson in how to use Creative Commons has been immeasurably useful. To give you an example

This week, my reading class has been practicing inference, and I like to bring in real world images to practice on before moving to the much drier textbook. Here's an example of an image I might use:

Photo Attribution:
Original image: "Funny Church Signs"
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2048/2404126159_6303673c95_m.jpg
by: Mel Silvers


Released under an Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/


As you may have noticed, I have included the copyright information for the picture.  In the past, I haven't done this very often mainly because I worried about how much time it would take and wasn't sure how to do it properly.  However, Creative Commons makes it super simple.  To give you another example of an image I might use, below is a picture taken in Nara, Japan. Even though most of my students can't speak Japanese, they can guess the meaning from the picture, and I have them write what the sign might be saying.  

 



I don't have to include copyright information because its from the Flickr page I share with my husband.