Creative Commons – resources

 

Mabel Smith cc licensed ( ) flickr photo by Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Grand Larceny – an offense of illegally taking another person’s property – is an issue.  I would argue with convicts, poor jail conditions and being transported, days of old were much rougher than in this day and age (well in developed countries anyway).   But what about the issue of taking  another person’s digital property?  Everyday I look at presentations, emails, brochures and more that have images on them that don’t belong to the person who right clicked their mouse and saved or downloaded an image.

How much teaching of digital citizenship belongs to PE teachers?  I would argue as much as any other subject.  We are a very visual subject, we use imagery to help our learners or to explain a task or to make our work more aesthetically pleasing.  We blog and encourage the use of student blogs and/or ‘Sportfolios’ and with this comes the job of ensuring our students are not stealing content from the internet and are attributing where they can.

In Education we need to teach and model how to promote/attribute the owner of digital work and when work has been shared for use and when work is copyrighted and should not be used.  This includes anything that we find on the internet and decide we’d like to use.  This is quite different to working within a commercial license. If you aren’t familiar with Creative commons, check out this great Commoncraft explanation.

The Creative Commons website has excellent ideas and resources to help students (and teachers) understand more about the differences between the CC licenses and how we can use them.  The main licenses are listed here.  For our student and teacher purposes it is important to know the five main logos and their meanings:

‘CC Conditions’ by Hamada licensed CC BY

Try and think about how you could model this behaviour in your school to fellow teachers, admin and your students.  Too often we steal images and don’t really think about the consequences.  It takes time to attribute work, but surely you would want your work attributed too.  So to engage in best practice, check out some of the following resources!  And don’t forget to talk to your Technology facilitator or librarian or Administrator about PD in this digital age.

Here is a useful pdf developed with CC of Australia and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation that shares how to use CC in online and offline documents with tips and ideas.

More reading from those in the know: (all of these have great links to more CC sites)

Drape’s Takes – Education + Technology blog by Darren Draper (USA) CC BY NC SA

Learning on the Job – Clint Hamada and his blog post on Creative commons CC BY SA

Educator’s Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons by Ronnie Burt

Websites:

Creative Commons search – an easy database to find music, images, media etc you can be sure is all CC.

Firefox + CC Search – a plugin tool for Firefox web browser users.

Educational resources for teaching digital literacy from the good folks at Common Sense.

FlickrCC photos – an online databank of only CC images

TinyEye labs – multicolour image search (need a CC image that is orange? check here!)

Google Advanced Search Image – make sure you choose the appropriate setting in the ‘usage rights’ box.

Chrome Extensions – add one of these extensions to your Chrome browser and have your images attributed for you!

Flickr Advanced Search – check the box to find the CC licensed content only.

Wikimedia Commons – database of free media files which you can add to as well!

ImageCodr – aren’t sure if your image has a CC license or what the license is?  Try this website.  Take the URL of your image and paste it into the box, then press submit.  You will then get a Result showing you the name of the photo and owner; as well as the CC license (and explanation) as well as teh HTML code ready to paste into your blog.  Here is an example:

I took this image and pasted the URL into ImageCodr.  This is what I got back from the website:

 A great way to get your students going with the blogs and sharing of content.

Audio

Dig. ccmixter is a great resource to find music for your movie, podcast or other.

Soundsnap – more music for your project.