Picture perfect: making the most of images when creating and sharing teaching resources Inspire article

Not sure how best to source and create images for sharing your teaching materials? It’s a snap if you follow these simple tips!

Worth a thousand words?

One of the joys of acting as Executive Editor for Science in School has been meeting all the fantastically engaged STEM teachers who are continually coming up with novel and creative teaching ideas for inspiring their students. It’s been a privilege to help some of them share these ideas with the wider STEM teaching community through publication in Science in School, but there are of course other avenues for sharing teaching ideas, from conferences and festivals to blogs and websites to social media and video platforms. Whatever the platform used, in STEM teaching, as in STEM research, images can be invaluable in communicating and explaining ideas; as the adage goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. In this article, I’d like to share some tips and lessons learned from the editorial process to help teachers make the most of images in posts, articles, presentations, and posters.

The whys and wherefores

Before considering where or how to obtain images, it’s important to first ask why. What are we trying to communicate? There are many possible functions for an image in an article, poster, or presentation, and these may come with different priorities. Images may be used to capture the audience’s interest or to provide an engaging visual example, and in this case, they need to be really visually appealing. Conversely, clarity is key for images intended to convey information, such as a scientific concept or experimental setup. Determining the purpose of the image will allow you to choose the most appropriate image type and source.

Copy with care

When looking for images to illustrate a teaching concept, many people first think to look for images online. The internet is indeed a source of very useful images, especially technical schemes, artists’ impressions to illustrate relationships or scale, and beautiful photographs. However, some care is required to avoid falling foul of copyright law.

Where do I find images to use?

            There are a number of places where you can conveniently find Creative Commons images. These include:

• Search engine filters: many search engines include options to filter for images under Creative Commons licences. For Google, when doing an image search, click on
  Tools→Usage rights→Creative Commons licences:

• Wikimedia commons: Wikimedia Commons is a repository of public-domain or freely licenced images. Most (but not all) images in Wikipedia articles also meet these criteria; you can always click on the image to get more information on the source and copyright.

• Flickr: this is an image-hosting service where people can upload and share their images. Some (but definitely not all!) creators make their images available under Creative Commons licences. You can filter for these images while searching.

• Stock image sites: there are stock image sites that offer images that are free to use. Not all of these sites properly check ownership for uploaded images, so they are not risk free, but are very commonly used.^[11,12] Always check the licence: some images require attribution and others don’t. Even when no attribution is required, it’s still good manners to credit the creator if you can.

• Open-access articles: many people are surprised that you can’t just use images from scientific papers; the copyright for these is owned by the publisher. However, open-access articles are typically published under some kind of CC BY licence; you can check this on the article page. Note: this only covers images created for that article. Authors will often also use images from other sources (with permission/attribution) and for these, the copyright conditions of the original source apply.

• Other sources: government departments, national institutions, and research organizations often also make images available for use. Since there are so many potential sources, the easiest way to find these images is through a filtered search (see first point). ESO and ESA have particularly nice collections of space images that can be used for educational purposes; make sure you read the conditions of use.^[13,14]

A final word of caution: with images as with text, just because something is online does not mean that it is accurate and correct. Check all images, especially scientific images, before using them.

Do it yourself

Another way of obtaining images is, of course, to create them yourself. This is often more effort but has the advantage that you can create images that show exactly what you need to communicate. This is particularly important when sharing teaching resources, where you will need to illustrate your exact experimental setup or results.

Snap happy

An obvious way to create images is to take photographs with a digital camera or smartphone. This can be especially useful to illustrate experimental setups and results

However, getting good-quality images can be challenging, especially with complex experimental setups. Here are a simple few tips for non-experts that can help:

• Ensure good lighting! This is essential to getting sharp photographs. Diffuse natural light is ideal but if artificial light is used, make sure it is bright enough, that you are not holding the camera in front of it and casting shadows, and that the key parts of the subject are well lit and not in shadow.

• Avoid taking photographs against/in front of a window or bright light source, where the subject will be in silhouette and details won’t be visible.

• Try to take photographs against a clean background so that your subject is clearly visible: either clear away distracting objects in the background, assemble your subject in front of a wall, or place a large piece of paper/card/fabric behind it.

• Think about the background colour. Try to ensure good contrast with what you’re photographing, for example, a light background is better for darker subjects and a dark background will be better for lighter subjects

• Take a step back: if your image (or a part of it) is not sharp, you might be too close to the subject. As long as the photographs are of good quality, you can crop them afterwards to focus in on certain areas.

• If any students’ faces are shown in the image, make sure you get written permission from both the students and their parents to use them online.

• Even if you don’t have a photo editor, like Photoshop, images can often be improved by using the simple editing tools in your phone or your computer’s photo viewer to crop out distracting background and adjust the brightness, contrast, or colour balance if necessary.

• Adding annotations or lines/arrows for emphasis can help to clarify the key details.

Finally, if you’re struggling, consider getting your students involved; older students are often very accomplished at taking (and editing) excellent photographs with their phones!

Draw the line

For complex experimental setups, setups with tricky-to-photograph elements like glassware or water, or complex scientific concepts, a scheme or diagram might be clearer than a photograph. These may be drawn from scratch by using a digital drawing tool or a graphic design tool like Canva, for example. Alternatively, diagrams may be assembled from other images, or photographs can be annotated to highlight the key features. If using other images that are not your own, make sure you have permission to use these and that they are all credited in the final image.

Some additional things to bear in mind are:

• Try to avoid overly busy diagrams: include only those elements that are essential to the meaning. Likewise, avoid placing too much text on diagrams, although exceptions can be made for large infographics.

• For diagrams containing edges and lines, including text, the commonly used raster file types (e.g., JPEG, PNG, TIFF) may appear fuzzy when uploaded to a website, especially if they are resized. To avoid this, export your diagrams as vector files (e.g., SVG) if possible.^[15]

• There is nothing wrong with hand-drawing diagrams and schemes and then scanning or taking photographs of them. Make sure they are well lit and use simple editing tools to adjust things like framing, angle, brightness, contrast, and colour.

• When colour carries important information, try to use accessible colour schemes.^[16]

• Use colour mindfully; thoughtless use of colour can actually make diagrams harder to understand. For example, if you use red to indicate positive charges, then no other text or image elements that aren’t related to positive charges should be red.
• Ensure any text is large enough to be read at the size the diagram will be shown.

It’s also becoming increasingly common to use generative-AI tools to create educational diagrams.^[17] If you do this, make sure you carefully check the output for accuracy and always declare the use of generative AI in the image credits.

Yes, you can!

All this information might give the impression that a lot can go wrong when using images, but it’s really not as scary as it may seem! Images can be a powerful addition to your resources, and hopefully these tips will help you make the most of them.

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