Copyright and Creative Commons in the classroom

flickr photo shared by GotCredit under a Creative Commons ( BY ) license

One of our key goals is to stop focusing quite so much on "do kids have computers in their classroom?" and start focusing more on "do kids have the basic social skills and cultural competencies so that when they do get computers in their classroom, they can participate fully?"

I completely agree with this quote from the framework of PLAY (Participating Learning and You).

And I had to start by educate myself with these terms: Creative Commons, mashup and remix. I found out how they could unlock our creativity and most importantly I learned how they could fit in the classroom.

My research led me to Common Sense Graphite website.
I was very inspired by reading this blog post that was linked to a lot of great resources to teach my students those social skills and competencies.
I had at a fingertip all the tools I needed, I just had to figure out how I will introduce the lesson to them. My Grade 5 are working on descriptions and expressing preferences. I jumped on this occasion to create a lesson where they would have to find on the Internet a picture they would have to describe. They would be my guinea pigs.
The conversation about privacy that we had earlier planted the seed: plagiarism and copyright will come up naturally.
As an introduction, I showed them this poster from Larry Ferlazzo's blog.

Then they watched  the "Creative Commons - Get Creative" video.

[caption id="attachment_128" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Image by M. Brutel[/caption]

I asked them this question: why do you think I showed you this video?
Answers were to be safe online and to post legal works.
The discussion turned differently when I asked them if I could take a picture of their homework (Note: The task was for them to find a picture of a celebrity and to describe his/her preferences) and posted it. I was expected that they all said yes. The video explained that any published work is de facto copyright unless we had a Creative Commons license.

[caption id="attachment_130" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Image by M. Brutel[/caption]

They surprised me answering that I shouldn’t do that. Their explanation was that the picture that illustrated their piece of writing was copyrighted.

We went on talking about the concept of fair use.
To explain what fair use is, I followed advices from Doug Jonhson in Changing how we teach copyright. I told my students:

The guidelines also allow students who create educational multimedia projects containing copyrighted materials to use their projects for

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  educational uses in the course for which they were created.

  
  


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  portfolios as examples of their academic work.

  
  


• 
  

  such personal uses as job and graduate school interviews.

  
  

To finish the lesson, I asked them to search for a picture that they could legally post online after describing it.

[caption id="attachment_127" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Image by M.Brutel[/caption]

I suggested them to start with a Google images search using the “labeled for reuse". I also gave more websites to explore like the CC Search and others  found in Larry Ferlazzo blog.

When they found their picture, they had to answer to the acronym TASL for Title, Author, Source and License. It's described on the Creative Commons website under best practices for attribution. The kids were really into it. Most of them were looking for famous singers or football players. They persevered in the search to find a picture that suited their need and their task.It was a very rewarding lesson and I learned a lot from it. I knew that I started with a little “lesson” but I had no idea that the students would enjoy it so much. They are surely ready for next step using a remix to learn literacy. It’s going to be our next project!

Images: top : GotCredit  in flickr photo , middle and down, M. Brutel