We all want to reduce paper usage and waste, but there are times when printing is necessary. You may be serving a community that does not have ready access to digital devices. You may be in a situation where posting announcements in public places is the best way to reach an audience outside the school community. You may need attractive posters or certificates for classroom use. Printing is not dead yet. There are times when it’s necessary to produce printed material, but there are never times when it’s necessary that your printed materials be boring or unattractive.
Your word processing program probably has templates and various sorts of clipart built in. These are convenient, but are often over-used. One resource at your disposal is the ClipArt ETC website. You can use up to 50 images at a time from that site for school purposes. (See license.) The vast majority of the images are black-and-white line drawings, which make for crisp black-and-white printing. With over 70,000 images, you’ll never be at a loss for special needs, whether it’s science equipment for a science fair poster, spring flowers for a spring newsletter, or leaf borders for a fall festival flyer.
We’ve picked a couple dozen borders and other images as samples of what you can make with content from the ClipArt ETC website. We’ve saved each out as a Word template, so you can easily edit the documents in Word, Pages, or any other program that opens Word docs. The headlines and “greeking” text can all be changed. They are just there for illustrative purposes. Enjoy these templates, but don’t forget that there are over 70,000 more images where these came from.
And if you have the luxury to be printing in color? We have that covered, too! Click on over to our post on Colorizing ClipArt.
You can also save any Word doc as a PDF. You may find that posting a PDF works for some of your intended audience and you only have to print for those who don’t have online access.
Click on any thumbnail below to download the Word document.
Additional Graphics Posts
- Colorizing ClipArt: Intro to Blending Modes
- Colorizing ClipArt: Using Gradient Maps
- Four Ways To Emphasize the Subject in Instructional Graphics
- Photo or Illustration?
- Using ClipArt ETC for Flyers and Newsletters
- Paper People for Your Preso
- Cutout People for Digital Narratives
- Converting Raster Clipart to Vector
- Signs for the Times: Repurposing ClipArt ETC traffic signs
- 4,000 Drop Caps: When and how to use FCIT's drop cap collection in your documents
- Custom Banners: How to manipulate an image so that it tiles (repeats) seamlessly
Roy Winkelman is a 40+ year veteran teacher of students from every level kindergarten through graduate school. As the former Director of FCIT, he began the Center's focus on providing students with rich content collections from which to build their understanding. When not glued to his keyboard, Dr. Winkelman can usually be found puttering around his tomato garden in Pittsburgh. Questions about this post or suggestions for a future topic? Email me at winkelma@usf.edu. To ensure that your email is not blocked, please do not change the subject line. Thank you!
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