Tar Heel Reader - Topic: Questionable Images

PennyT on Questionable Images

Sun, 10 May 2009 16:10:57 +0000

On the same topic--even pictures that look okay in thumbnail format can be less-appropriate when you see them full screen. I once included a photo of a young girl--looked fine as a thumbnail, but when I reviewed the finished book, I could see that her dress was more revealing than I realized (innocently so, I think, but it would still be a distraction). It was no trouble to replace the photo, once I knew.

So always, always review your final product with an eye for such details. It's one thing to choose an image with maturer content; but it's another to use something startling without even realizing it.

Gary on Questionable Images

Tue, 05 May 2009 08:54:08 +0000

The pictures you see when searching in the book writing wizard come directly to you from Flickr, a giant web repository of images. We use the interface they provide for selecting and filtering images but the filtering is only as good as the tags placed on the images by the Flickr users. You will almost certainly find images that are inappropriate for some students when searching on Flickr.

We never intended the book writing tool to be directly accessed by children. We understand that some teachers may be using it that way but we advise against it. A better strategy for allowing your children to write on the site is for you to preselect a set of pictures and put them on book pages. Your students can then delete the pages they don't want and rearrange the others while writing captions. That way you are in control of the images your students see.

We do try to keep up with the images and text in books that are published on our site but you may see images and captions that are inappropriate for your K-4 students in published books as well. Many of our beginning readers are teenagers for whom these texts are appropriate. We try to mark books that are potentially inappropriate for some readers with the caution category (the red exclamation on the front page) but there are likely books that have not yet been so marked. We recommend that teachers of young readers use the favorites feature to give students access to a limited set of appropriate books.

Ed Tech Diva on Questionable Images

Tue, 05 May 2009 08:25:43 +0000

Imagine how thrilled I was to be able to find a website that would allow my K-4 students to write and add images that were licensed under Creative Commons. Of course, as always, I decided to preview the site to see if there might be any issues that might arise. Oops! There was! I did a search with the term 'girl', and on the second page there was an image of just female legs and underwear pulled down around the ankles! Oh, oh....

Could you please tell me how images are selected for the website and if anyone reviews them prior to being posted on your website.

Thanks a bunch!