For this task, I chose to collect public domain sources related to the native trees and plants of Oregon. After fiddling around on Microsoft OneNote for a few minutes, I felt as though I was completely incapable of operating a computer. There were so many toolbars and sidebars that I had no idea where to go or what to do in order save my sources. I decided to switch over to Google Keep instead. I found Keep to be fairly easy to use. The user interface of Keep was a lot simpler and didn’t have nearly as many options as OneNote, which I personally find to be a good thing. I downloaded Keep as an extension to my Google Chrome browser. Every time I found a source that I was interested in saving, I simply clicked on the Keep logo in my browser’s toolbar and a link to the webpage was saved in Keep.
I found a few of the public domain search tools to be very helpful. Flickr was a great source for finding images. It was easy to search for images and identify the type of license associated with each image. My only problem with Flickr was that many of the images were incorrectly labelled by the person who posted them. For example, I found this image of a lady fern when I was searching for a sword fern.
I’m not a plant expert, but I was able to identify several other images on both Flickr and Google Images Creative Commons Search that were incorrectly labelled. This could potentially be a problem for students who are researching native plants for a school project. Incorrectly labelled images might cause confusion about what plants look like. On the other hand, it might be good practice for students to filter through information and identify which sources are reliable.
Image credit to vladeb