Teaching - Graphics for PowerPoint lectures

[PowerPoint lecturer]

I spend way too much time searching the internets for good graphics that I can incorporate into my PowerPoint lecture slides. The ones I find are often slightly outdated, or they have really low resolution and look like crap when projected on the big screen. I do have a collection of resources provided by various textbook publishers, but none of them are very satisfying.

Does anybody know of a good collection of graphics that can help illustrate contemporary topics typically brought up in an intro course? Stratification, gender inequality, educational attainment, incarceration rates, that sort of thing. Ideally, these would already be sized for PowerPoint files.

While free would be great, I'm interested in quality and I would be willing to pay for a dvd collection if there's any such beast out there for sale. (I do know of www.thesocietypages.org , by the way, and it has been first on my list for searching for quite a while. The collection seems a bit random, though, and it isn't easy to find something specific very quickly.)

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

[Islander]

It sounds like you want charts and graphs. In other words, summaries of numbers. There is another way. Search compfight.com for images related to your content. This is basically a strong flickr search engine, and you can limit your search to creative commons photos, which are free.

Pick an image or images that illustrate your point, or the point of the charts/numbers and figures, and you won't have students scrambling to copy numbers or the figures, but rather thinking about the relationship between the image and the concept it represents.

[TSC]

You might also find some helpful graphics on The Sociological Cinema's Facebook page. Images are organized into photo albums, categorized by common teaching topics (e.g., race & ethnicity, demography/aging/life course, crime/law/incarceration, social class/poverty, etc…). Much of the collection consists of photographs/images that can be used to illustrate sociological concepts and spark class conversation, but there are also some charts/numbers/figures available.