You can avoid the danger of a clip art search by browsing the list below. This list includes five of the best resources for the highest quality clip art available. These are websites with educational clipart categories created specifically for educators.

Discovery Education's Motivation Station
The first resource is from the
Discovery Channel, often a source of the best educational resources, not only for science teachers but for all educators. This is a special area set up within the Discovery Channel's "Discovery Education domain". While it is obviously set up to sell the giant CD collection of 3,000 clip art images, the free clipart available within the many categories is still fairly extensive.

Categories for Discovery Clipart
For example, Logos and Mascots has 104 clipart images, science has 133 images, and language arts has 84 high quality images.

Lots of Educational Clipart Choices
All of these hand-drawn clip art images were created by illustrator Mark Hicks, exclusively for Discovery Education. While you're at the Discovery Education website, visiting the other valuable areas for educators and students would be an excellent use of your time. Another fantastic resource for educational clipart is actually from a website dedicated to "making the world a better place one cartoon at a time," called
A Perfect World.

A Perfect World Clipart
Of course, there are few better ways to create a better world than to donate helpful resources to teachers and students. That's exactly what A Perfect World does with these clipart resources. These are high quality cartoons and drawings covering many categories - such as Home and Family, Metaphors, Nature and much more.
One of the most comprehensive and useful listings of free clipart for education is
Classroom Clipart. This website has thousands upon thousands of some of the highest quality images and clip art distributed across a whole range of categories, which you can browse directly from the main page.

Classroom Clipart Categories
Within each of these categories you'll find some of the most amazing images taken by professional photographers, such as the geography category where you'll find impressive high-quality images of plants, animals and places from all around the world. The only stipulation is that you must keep the embedded website name on the image that you use. However, for most educators or students, that isn't a problem at all because the faint white text at the bottom of the image does not detract from the quality very much.
Another very useful, free resource for images and pictures that are very useful in any classroom is
Pics4Learning. Pics4Learning is set up a lot like Classroom Clipart in terms of the way the images are organized into categories and displayed on the main page, however the clipart itself is just as high quality, if not more so.

Browsing Pics4Learning
As you start browsing through Pics4Learning, you'll quickly realize how amazing the website is. In addition to providing some of the most amazing imagery (both in photographs as well as drawn images), the website offers all of these impressive clipart images for absolutely free for teachers and students, without any strings attached at all.

Pics4Learning Images
For example, in the "animals" category, you'll find beautiful images of aquatic wildlife, ducks, reptiles, insects and much more. In each category, there are pages and pages of free images, so it appears the numbers on the main page are a little bit misleading. There are far more images available on this site than anyone may suspect upon first glance at the main page.
A popular resource for teachers is
Teacher Files, so it should come as little surprise that the clipart section of that website offers some of the highest quality free educational clipart resources on the web.

The Teacher Files Main Page
Teacher Files is a well known free resource for educators, offering many tools such as free lesson ideas, printables and more. One of the most popular areas is the clip art. In this section of the site, you'll find fifteen categories for the images, including US Currency, Page Dividers, School Subject Titles and more.

The Teacher File Clipart
Unlike many other free clip art sites online, Teacher Files really focuses on images that are very useful to teachers in the classroom, such as clock faces or pictures of currency - things that teachers need in order to provide young children with basic skills, as well as images that foster learning in more advanced subjects as well. Of all of the clip art resources, this is the one most geared toward teachers.
Finding clip art on the Internet isn't always easy. Most of the resources that are available are usually of very small or low-quality icons and images that are really sub-par in quality and not very useful for most teachers. However, the sites above set the standard for quality in free educational web images that teachers and students can not only use in the classroom, but also on printed handouts and class websites or other online reference materials.
Update June 23rd 2010
Another great clipart resource is
Timtim.com, a free collection of drawings for children, teachers, parents, schools, churches, charities, and private individuals in need of images for coloring, decorating, greeting cards, or learning for non-commercial projects

Timtim.com Clipart