Teaching Digital Citizenship #2

The Lawn off of which you should stay! Pre-raking.

Using Digital Images

@joe_edtech

Here in the United States, we respect property rights. Before you ask, no, I am not sitting on my front porch yelling at the neighborhood kids to, "Stay off my lawn!" It is very cold out, so I posted a sign.

Seriously, respecting property rights means respecting digital property rights as well. As we move towards 1:1 environments, we are increasingly asking our students to create digital projects, videos, presentations, collages, etc. We want our students to create beautiful, content rich products, and that frequently means we are asking them to use existing digital images to convey a message, create a mood, or even get a laugh. So how do we get them to produce good quality stuff and still respect digital copyright laws? I suggest there are two simple steps that we can take as teachers and educational leaders that will go a long way to guiding our students in the direction of good citizenship.

The first thing sounds easy, and it is completely within our control, but it may require some additional time and effort. As we move towards more digital curricula, most of us are creating class websites, utilizing Learning Management Systems, blogging, or flipping our classrooms. We should be doing our best to dress those sites up - always thinking about design - with copyright free images (that usually means open license with attribution required). Then secondly, we should model searches for copyright free digital images anytime we work with students on visual projects.  (By the way, I am trying to practice what I preach on this blog.  So far, every image used on this blog has been in the public domain or licensed attribution only, except for screenshots, which fall under the Fair Use exemption in the context of a review. And of course the picture of my lawn above, which is mine. Stay off.)

So, where can you find good open content to use? You can find copyright free digital images in an advanced Google Search, in some Flickr feeds, or a search of Wikimedia Commons. But my favorite place to start is Creative Commons.

Creative Commons Search Page

On the Creative Commons search page, you can simply enter your topic and decide where you would like to search for your ready to use educational content. I usually start by coming to this page and searching Google Images, but there are thousands of great images in Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. Virtually any kind of image is yours to download and use for educational purposes, as long as you give credit to the owner.

There is probably a dissertation to be written about digital media in schools (I'm not going to write it - I've got my own dissertation to worry about), but if we take just these simple steps, we can help our students be better digital citizens.

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If you have a favorite way of searching for copyright free or creative commons images, please share with us in the comment box below.