An introduction to Creative Commons

So, lots and lots of reading. And thinking. And waiting for the right time in my curriculum. Finally at the end of last term, I  got to do my “Intro to Creative Commons” lesson for my Grade 5s. We had just finished a big unit of work where the boys completed a lot of research about how to play various sports and at the beginning of the unit I had shown them some PowerPoint presentations that boys in previous years had made in French, planning to complete our unit with a similar type of activity.

Well now, as my curriculum never works in the same way for two different classes, I ended up with not nearly enough time to complete a long presentation (10-12 slides) with each boy. So with just 2 weeks to go, I decided to go for a much smaller project in terms of the “French” component and focus on Creative Commons as a search tool for the images they would need.

Creative Commons image

We started out by discussing the © symbol and what it meant, where you would see it and why. It was interesting to hear the boys’ take on what “copyrighted material” meant (some of them actually thought it meant that the symbol meant Copy+Right = “it’s ok to copy”.  While we, as adult might be surprised to hear they don’t know or completely understand copyright, I had to take a step back and ask myself “Well why would they?”

I showed them this short video which I thought made the “big picture” pretty clear.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtJdfHXk_u8[/youtube]

Of course, many many questions ensued – and not just about using images from the Internet – but also about using other people’s music, films, writing etc…  Talk about a can of worms…  Also, little boys being little boys, a few of them were a little stuck on the “illegal” part of using other people’s work without permission and there were quite a few “So you mean if I did X, Y or Z, I’d go to jail” type questions…. 😉 I managed to successfully move the conversation back to the use of images in the classroom, telling them we’d discuss that another time (and I plan to!) and at the end of the lesson, I asked for a summary about why we had this lesson about only using images that we have permission to use when it’s *just* a classroom setting and the best answer had to be “Because it’s about doing the right thing.”

I’d say that was a successful first intro to Copyright for Kids, wouldn’t you?

 

3 thoughts on “An introduction to Creative Commons”

  1. Justin Medved

    I think that teaching the concept of “attribution” is an important one and one that needs to find its way into any classroom assignment that has students creating using web content. I think the reason that the creative commons is not widely know among teachers is that many are not creating and sharing original content (pictures,music,video,art) on the web. Those who do are very aware of its importance as the culture of sharing and remixing develops over time. How did the students respond to this? Did they get it?

    1. Mardi Michels Post author

      Hi Justin, thanks for commenting. Yes, as someone who DOES create and share original content a number of times a week on my *other* blog, I guess I am more aware than many of the implications (and also, how it feels to have your work taken and used without permission) which is perhaps why I have chosen to focus on this. By using concrete examples from my own blog (I just happen to have had a photo and recipe used without permission that very week) the boys did seem to understand and relate as best as 10 year olds can. I think the “doing the right thing” message did hit home… In my next post I will share their reflections.

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