Northern Grid for Learning - School Broadband, eSafety, Learning Resources and More

The NEN Gallery is a versatile resource for use across the curriculum. Over the last few months E2BN has been adding a whole new range of functionality so now it's even better and faster to use

A faster and more flexible Gallery

The latest upgrade to the Gallery sees faster upload and download speeds, better searching facilities and other new features such as picture of the day, links allowing you to share images or recommend good resources you have found. You can also see the latest pictures uploaded and more resources will shortly be added to an expanded teacher's area. For those that would like to embed the Gallery into their own Learning Platforms or other website, a new customisable widget has been developed: the Gallery embed widget allows users colour of albums and folders and then copy some code and embed it in their own site. Once embedded the widget draws the selected folders and images from the Gallery for display anywhere on the web.

Why use the NEN Gallery?

Quite simply, the NEN Gallery is a free site, packed with thousands of unique, high quality, E-Safe images which can be downloaded and used copyright free for educational purposes. Still need some more reasons to use it?

• Thousands of high resolution images to use; no tiny, watermarked and bitty images unlike some image searches
• All images are available for class and school project use, without breaching copyright
• All images are appropriate: no nasty surprises from innocent keywords
• Image resolution is high enough to use effectively in interactive whiteboards and presentations
• All images are available in high and lower resolution images, a large one for your whiteboard and a smaller one for image based work
• Albums are easy to set up and fill with personal image selections. Images for lessons, subjects and topics can be gathered once and kept in one place
• You can add images to an album and view them directly from the site – saves downloading time and using up storage space on your laptop
• Want images of your village, your school, a particular place or object? Take the images you want to use, upload them easily and re-use over and over again
• Access images from museum collections across the UK, many of which are available nowhere else
• Images cover a fantastic breadth and range of subjects: festivals and celebrations, periods of history, artefacts and documents, streets and buildings, people and signs, plants, animals and insects
• The Gallery also contains a unique and growing collection of audio files and videos for educational use

12 ideas for using the the NEN Gallery

• Challenge your pupils to illustrate how an aspect of our lives has changed - clothing, food, entertainment, transport – by downloading 10 images from the Gallery
• Use E2BN's Picture Teller with a number of images and let your pupils record a narration to accompany the pictures
• Ask your pupils to download a picture related to their current study and to annotate it in an image-editing package
• Download a recording of a famous speech - Churchill, Kennedy, or Ghandi - and ask your pupils to use images from the Gallery to illustrate the speech
• Download the unedited copyright-free video clips from the Gallery and let your pupils edit them to tell their own story or create their own presentation
• Start the year by asking every pupil in your class to bring in one image of a place they have visited in the summer holidays and upload them to the Gallery with explanatory notes
• Make an animated movie or digital story and download lots of pictures as background and free sound effects from the E2BN Gallery to bring your story to life
• Create a link with another school anywhere in the world and let both schools upload photos of activities at their school to the Gallery to share the experiences
• Use the hundreds of images from local and regional museums to prepare for a visit to one of them and to carry out follow-up work on your return to school
• Challenge your pupils to take digital images for inclusion on the site or add your own images to share with other teachers and their students
• Use the 'My Albums' feature to create a slideshow on a particular topic. Instead of downloading the images simply add them to your own 'Albums' folder and run the album as a slideshow
• Download and print the images to make beautiful (and free) classroom posters for History, Geography, RE and Art