Copyright resides in the murky waters of education as a concept that teachers truly know very little about, but also a rule that teachers seldom want to follow or explore more deeply. After all, copyright is restrictive and prevents teachers from liberally applying fair use guidelines to any creative work they deem appropriate for education, such as ignoring the © symbol and copying entire chapters from workbooks, posting scanned images of entire textbooks online, and having students create PowerPoint presentations or other projects with images that are not properly attributed to the creator all in the name of “education.” While education does allow for less stringent application of copyright in educational settings, it does not remove all barriers to using a creative work, especially when such material is made available to individuals not in the specific classroom because it is posted to the Internet for student and public use.
Perhaps the most common violation of copyright laws in education comes in the form of “lesson plan snooping,” a term I’ve given to the practice of browsing other teachers’ websites or wikis and borrowing documents they’ve used in their classroom for use in one’s own classroom. While some lesson sharing websites make it clear that resources are available for public consumption or transformation, if these affordances are not clearly made, then technically copyright infringement is committed, especially when such documents are reposted to the web as property of the borrowing teacher. I myself have been guilty of such copyright violation and could not identify for you the true owners of all my teaching materials; some are my original creations, others have been transformed into new ideas based on inspiration from others, and some are clear copies of the work produced by other teachers. While I have not sold any work produced by another teacher, my use of these materials may fall into those murky waters of fair use, especially if Creative Commons licensing was not applicable.
Creative Commons recognizes that many individuals find collaboration with their works to be acceptable. These content creators publish items to the web not only for personal enjoyment, or for family entertainment, or for students’ educational purposes, but also so that others may adopt or adapt their work or a portion of that work, a practice very common in education. As an English teacher who frequently uses PowerPoint and Photostory as productivity tools for students to create digital presentations, I have become very aware of fair use guidelines allowed for educational purposes, such as only allowing students to include only 30 seconds of a copyrighted song, rather than the full text to a digital story. Creative Commons, however, expands students’ possibilities for using image and music productivity tools since creators of this content expressly allow use of their work for such purposes. Students may include an entire song or more than 5 images by a single photographer if these works are covered under Creative Commons. While Creative Commons materials may represent a lesser portion of all potential images, audio clips, video clips, or songs, requiring students to use Creative Commons resources seems to be a positive and effective way to introduce and reinforce the concepts of copyright and fair use. By giving students access to materials that are free from copyright or have limited copyrights, they are less tempted to violate copyrighted materials since a wealth of available resources is easily accessible. For example, Richardson (2010) notes that at the time of his book’s publication, 25 million photos posted to Flickr, a photo-sharing website, carried the Creative Commons license; when students have access to 25 million or more copyright free pictures, they are much less tempted to use copyrighted images in a way that possibly violates fair use.
I will be completely honest in saying I have never seen the Creative Commons license on a website I have searched, unless I have performed a Google search for “Creative Commons pictures” or “Copyright free music.” Therefore, I would suggest that its relative infancy still makes Creative Commons less effective than it could be. Thousands, I would venture to say, of content producers post their content to the web, fully accepting and appreciating the fact that others may copy it without specifically obtaining a Creative Commons license. I, for example, post all worksheets, presentations, and podcasts I create for my students to my school website, with the understanding that others can use my work as if it were their own, yet I have never included a Creative Commons license on any of these materials. In completing this assignment, I did find an add-on for Microsoft Office products that allows users to create Creative Commons licenses for documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. Perhaps in the future, Creative Commons licensing will become more familiar because of such tools. I would even venture to say that copyright law may eventually change to make a Creative Commons license the default when any content is produced and require content producers to take the additional steps to secure full copyright if the creator wishes to reserve all rights. Such reversal of the current law would certainly be in line with spirit of collaboration and community that seems to be the hallmark of 21st century learning.
In thinking about how to use Creative Commons and Flickr, I was especially interested in Teacher Dude’s suggestion to use Flickr to help students visualize the definition of specific vocabulary words. I typically have my students create “word maps” for each vocabulary word assigned, and one component of this assignment requires students to draw a picture that helps them to visualize the word. I think Flickr could easily be implemented in this assignment by having students search for Creative Commons images related to each vocabulary word. One of our current vocabulary words is “verdant,” and in searching that word in Flickr, I found this lovely picture, which clearly illustrates the definition of verdant as “having a greenish hue.” Although Flickr is not exactly intuitive in its search feature, what I found promising was that the word “verdant,” yielded me many possible images. This suggests that the tags used on the pictures are not limited to simplistic vocabulary. Therefore, as my students prepare for SAT vocabulary, Flickr should be able to provide them with relevant pictures, without having to use synonyms for search terms.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Perhaps the most common violation of copyright laws in education comes in the form of “lesson plan snooping,” a term I’ve given to the practice of browsing other teachers’ websites or wikis and borrowing documents they’ve used in their classroom for use in one’s own classroom. While some lesson sharing websites make it clear that resources are available for public consumption or transformation, if these affordances are not clearly made, then technically copyright infringement is committed, especially when such documents are reposted to the web as property of the borrowing teacher. I myself have been guilty of such copyright violation and could not identify for you the true owners of all my teaching materials; some are my original creations, others have been transformed into new ideas based on inspiration from others, and some are clear copies of the work produced by other teachers. While I have not sold any work produced by another teacher, my use of these materials may fall into those murky waters of fair use, especially if Creative Commons licensing was not applicable.
Creative Commons recognizes that many individuals find collaboration with their works to be acceptable. These content creators publish items to the web not only for personal enjoyment, or for family entertainment, or for students’ educational purposes, but also so that others may adopt or adapt their work or a portion of that work, a practice very common in education. As an English teacher who frequently uses PowerPoint and Photostory as productivity tools for students to create digital presentations, I have become very aware of fair use guidelines allowed for educational purposes, such as only allowing students to include only 30 seconds of a copyrighted song, rather than the full text to a digital story. Creative Commons, however, expands students’ possibilities for using image and music productivity tools since creators of this content expressly allow use of their work for such purposes. Students may include an entire song or more than 5 images by a single photographer if these works are covered under Creative Commons. While Creative Commons materials may represent a lesser portion of all potential images, audio clips, video clips, or songs, requiring students to use Creative Commons resources seems to be a positive and effective way to introduce and reinforce the concepts of copyright and fair use. By giving students access to materials that are free from copyright or have limited copyrights, they are less tempted to violate copyrighted materials since a wealth of available resources is easily accessible. For example, Richardson (2010) notes that at the time of his book’s publication, 25 million photos posted to Flickr, a photo-sharing website, carried the Creative Commons license; when students have access to 25 million or more copyright free pictures, they are much less tempted to use copyrighted images in a way that possibly violates fair use.
I will be completely honest in saying I have never seen the Creative Commons license on a website I have searched, unless I have performed a Google search for “Creative Commons pictures” or “Copyright free music.” Therefore, I would suggest that its relative infancy still makes Creative Commons less effective than it could be. Thousands, I would venture to say, of content producers post their content to the web, fully accepting and appreciating the fact that others may copy it without specifically obtaining a Creative Commons license. I, for example, post all worksheets, presentations, and podcasts I create for my students to my school website, with the understanding that others can use my work as if it were their own, yet I have never included a Creative Commons license on any of these materials. In completing this assignment, I did find an add-on for Microsoft Office products that allows users to create Creative Commons licenses for documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. Perhaps in the future, Creative Commons licensing will become more familiar because of such tools. I would even venture to say that copyright law may eventually change to make a Creative Commons license the default when any content is produced and require content producers to take the additional steps to secure full copyright if the creator wishes to reserve all rights. Such reversal of the current law would certainly be in line with spirit of collaboration and community that seems to be the hallmark of 21st century learning.
In thinking about how to use Creative Commons and Flickr, I was especially interested in Teacher Dude’s suggestion to use Flickr to help students visualize the definition of specific vocabulary words. I typically have my students create “word maps” for each vocabulary word assigned, and one component of this assignment requires students to draw a picture that helps them to visualize the word. I think Flickr could easily be implemented in this assignment by having students search for Creative Commons images related to each vocabulary word. One of our current vocabulary words is “verdant,” and in searching that word in Flickr, I found this lovely picture, which clearly illustrates the definition of verdant as “having a greenish hue.” Although Flickr is not exactly intuitive in its search feature, what I found promising was that the word “verdant,” yielded me many possible images. This suggests that the tags used on the pictures are not limited to simplistic vocabulary. Therefore, as my students prepare for SAT vocabulary, Flickr should be able to provide them with relevant pictures, without having to use synonyms for search terms.
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.