Copyright and Creative Commons

Creative Commons?  I think there are many people who really don't know what that is.  They are aware of copyright and "borrowing" or using other's work, but when they see a CC or some other symbol by an image on the Internet do they know what it means?  It wasn't that long ago that I was in the classroom and did not pay much attention to the symbols by images.  I would "borrow/use" images off Google all of the time and to recognize the author I would only provide a link.  Not good enough - especially for our students!!  Our students are using the Internet to produce more and more content and they MUST know the proper way to give credit when using other's materials.

For those of you who need some basic information on Copyright and Creative Commons take a peek at the images below provided to me from gcflearnfree.org.

Image Source:Shihaam @ education-copyright.org

I have also embedded a great overview video that goes more in-depth on all of the different licenses and what the symbols mean.

As educators we really must prepare our students for 21st century learning - this is one topic of many that needs to be had in schools/classrooms.  The next project you have your students complete make sure you model to them how to use the advanced search in Google to filter by license and be sure to have them provide the source of the material being used.

I attended a great workshop on creating iBooks this summer and one of the attendees provided us a link to his Wiki page that houses a slew of Open Educational Resources (OER).  These links are  great place to start if you are having your students create content or, for that matter, if you are creating content.

OER List