Pixabay is a site that houses over one million free images and videos that have been uploaded by users around the world. All content found on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons CC0 license which means that you can use any of the content in any way you wish, even for commercial purposes. 

Each image and video uploaded to the site is manually approved to ensure it does not violate Pixabay’s guidelines. Content that is adult-themed or depicts strong violence is not accepted, however sometimes images that might be offensive to some do not violate the guidelines and therefore are found on the site. 

Pixabay offers several ways to deal with images that are not appropriate in schools. They offer a safe search option, which allows a user to turn on safe search on a browser level. Pixabay also offers an option that allows teachers to share a URL with their students which will prevent them from turning the safe search option off. Another option is for the IT department to enforce SafeSearch on the entire network by updating the current DNS configuration. 

Applications for Education

It’s important for students to have places where they can find content and use it legally. Pixabay offers districts a way to make this popular resource safe for students to use.