During an observation of professional development sessions for content teachers, a social studies representative brought up the fact that “nearly half of the images” students use for projects and screensavers are done so without abiding by copyright law. I would say that’s a fair assessment. Though I spent two years teaching Microsoft’s Digital Citizenship curriculum, I immediately felt uncertain about my recent use of creative content. Had I misused pictures in my previous posts? I know better, but I am not sure if I’d in fact, done better. By the end of this post, I will have assessed my own citation using my old lesson plans which were inspired by Microsoft’s Digital Citizenship curriculum.
From Creative What?, a unit in which students learn about their creative rights, words and phrases like intellectual property, creative content, copyright law, reproduction, modification, public domain and fair use are rampant. In fact, students are provided with a plethora of .gov sites which discuss the ins and outs of each of these terms. Moreover, the curriculum provides plans by which learning is authenticated as a result of MSDC’s student challenges to settle case studies and write policy as if they were creative content policy makers.
From By Rule of Law: Students learn the value of the creative process and how the government encourages this process with protective rights. This unit provides an in-depth look into the what, why and how of the laws designed so that we’ll keep creating. Words and phrases like ethics, offenses, illegal downloading, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are explored here.
From Calling All Digital Citizens: How does fair use and sharing through social media outlets come into play? Are we infringing upon anyone’s rights and how is the law catching up to advances in social networking technology? These questions are addressed in this unit and students are usually surprised as to how often they’ve been guilty of offenses.
From Protect Your Work, Respect Your Work: An empowering series of activities, students begin to protect and respect their own work because they see themselves as contributors to the digital world.
Final assessment: My use of images on this blog is protected under fair use, which allows for creative content to be used for the sake of educational purposes (teaching, reporting, critiques, commentary, etc.) however, I’m not totally out of the woods. Proper citation, in this case adding links from where I retrieved images, will take care of it. I can also create my own images, use clip art or search public domains and creative commons areas. Don’t be surprised if you see images appearing slightly different than before.
Check out and Register for Microsoft’s Digital Citizenship Curriculum here. The series eliminates all the guess work and most of the lesson planning. Students will have been engaged throughout each lesson.
NB: The image you see above is the Bruce Leroy Dozier movie poster my students created as a result of the script they wrote and produced during the Calling All Digital Citizens unit.
