Finding pictures on the web

When talking about kids' safety on the Internet, finding pictures seems to be one of the trickiest things I have to manage. I once had a student search for "eight" and get a picture of nude people!

If the topic for a project is narrow - like levers, Revolutionary War, weather - I collect a folder of pictures from which they can choose that is stored on the server. The problem with this plan is that they do not have the information to cite the source of the pictures. Not sure how to fix this. I thought about putting the pictures in a Word file with the URL, but some of these folders are very large which would make for a very large Word file. It would also take them much longer to find a picture; in the folder they are in alphabetical order. Perhaps another way to tackle this would be to create a folder of links so they would actually go to the picture on the web and be able to get the URL for each picture. Not sure how I could do this and make it easy for them to quickly find an appropriate picture. I prefer to give them more choices rather than less; that way the projects don't all look the same.

I also have projects like homophone sentences for which there is no way to predict what pictures they might need. This is when they need to search the Internet for pictures. So far we have used Google safe search and the kid-safe search engines that are linked on the school web site. I just like Google because it is so easy to click on "Images" and get lots of pictures. The other thing I tell students is to not go past the first page of results because those are usually the best choices for their topic. I have tried using safe picture sites like Pics4learning, but those do not have enough choices, and the search engine there is not very good.