Author Archives: Mardi Michels

About Mardi Michels

I'm a core #AIMLang French teacher who loves to integrate technology meaningfully into classes. Also eatlivetravelwrite.com (food and travel blog).

The importance of real world examples for our students

CD_DVD_Collections

(image via Wikipedia)

At last week’s final Cohort 21 Face to Face session, I chatted with Bart and Erin about our action plan journeys.  We touched on a number of challenges we had each come up against, namely that “tech” (ok that’s a bit of an all-encompassing term but we were all talking about slightly different aspects – social media, use of computers/ iPads in the classroom, computer science as a subject) gets a bit of a bad rap from parents and colleagues. Too often, only the negative side of using tech (too much screen time! online bullying!) is talked about with not enough emphasis on the positives. I mentioned that I have been fortunate to have had the example of my own personal blog and social media presence which have afforded me amazing opportunities over the past five years. I would like to think that my little corner of the world wide web shows a little bit of what’s possible and some of the good that can come from being “tech-savvy” for want of a better word.

This week, I had the chance to “see” my Cohort 21 Action Plan spring into action, so to speak 😉 when two separate but connected incidents reminded me why I started this journey in the first place…

It just so happens I was responding to a comment on one of my YouTube videos the other evening when I noticed that YouTube had flagged it “Matched Third Party Content“. When I made the video, I was bored with the iLife/ iMovie music and searched the internet for some royalty free tunes I could use, and found this “Fig Leaf Rag” on Incompetech, which is a site providing royalty-free music as long as it is correctly attributed.  I did the correct thing and attributed the music as per the instructions at the end of the video which you can see here:

[youtube width=”560″ height=”315″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ASgbxszTKw[/youtube]

But because it’s a royalty-free version of a well-known tune, the YouTube bots have scanned it and found it to be third-party content because the bots don’t read, they just listen. I’ve filed a dispute (I have had to do this before with a tune from the iLife suite!) but I think it will all be ok.

Yesterday I was walking by one of the classrooms where a few students were working on a video for their “Take me Outside” project. Right at the end of the video there was some music that one of them had imported from their iTunes – perhaps not more than fair use allows (though there doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule – I’ve heard 6 seconds is ok, I’ve also read 30 seconds is ok) but in any case, when questioned about this the boys thought that because they had paid for the song on iTunes, they were allowed to use it in their video. I asked them where the video was going to be posted and they told me it was going to YouTube so I cautioned them about the bots what would scan their video and might flag it as matching third party content. Showing them the example from my own video was so helpful – I showed them where I found the music, how I attributed it correctly and explained that YouTube doesn’t read or watch the videos – they just listed to the music to see if it might be third party content.  The boys (and their teacher) were not aware of this – so I showed them a few sites to look for other music (and how to attribute it) but also pointed them in the safe direction of the iLife/ iMovie music available on iMovie.  What a perfect teachable moment!

 

Process over product. And baby steps.

There is no finish line

Photo by Fabienne Wassermann via Flickr Creative Commons

So, here I am, just days away from the final Cohort 21 session. The final session. Yikes!  I’ve written my final brief reflections up in a Prezi which you can access here. But is this the end?

In my school, we emphasize process over product with the boys. It’s an approach I like a lot because it allows me the freedom to not finish some activities perfectly (case in point – the Powerpoints the boys made about how to play certain sports were unfinished when they wrote their reflections. And that was ok!). It also allows me the freedom to change course part-way through an activity if it’s not working.

Ok so this might sound like I just teach on the fly and decide what I am doing in my classrooms at the spur of the moment – but it’s not like that, I assure you! Rather, it’s about being a thoughtful practitioner, sensitive to the needs of one’s students and to what is working with a particular class. Because, at the end of the day, you can have an awesome project on paper but it just might not work with a class (I find the way projects work varies dramatically from group to group from year to year) and when that’s happening, you need to be able to step away and change course.

My Cohort “plan” has been a little bit like this. Here’s what I *thought* I might like to work on:

C21 Action Plan Mardi Michels

And to a certain extent I have done just that.

I’ve read a LOT (about digital citizenship in particular, education and 21st century learning in general).

I’ve attended talks about digital citizenship.

I’ve connected with people on Twitter, broadening my Professional Learning Network and following hashtags that interest me (#digcit #aimlang #iPadEd).

I’m just having a hard time with the fact that my “final” Cohort presentation doesn’t have to include any formal conclusions.  My action plan (which I was, being the multitasker that I am, using to complete my Folio Collaborative project for this school year) was to come up with a “cheat sheet” for teachers who want to teach their classes about copyright for kids. I do have a lot of that information already in place (although the pieces are all over the place!). And I’ll be collating that information over the next couple of weeks.

But at this point, I realise I’m nowhere near “finishing” my Cohort “work” as much as I would have liked – I guess in my head I had thought my “project” would wrap up but it’s not like that, is it? It’s ongoing.  Because it’s about continuing education. For teachers. There is no finish line.

Reflecting on the Creative Commons Search tool

 

Continuing on from my last post where I introduced the Grade 5s to the Creative Commons search tool, today I thought it would be interesting to share the student reflection process we completed at the end of the unit.

thinking-31254_640

Image via Pixabay

When we complete work units, I will often sit down with the boys and have them tell me the process we went through to get to the final product.  It’s always interesting for them to think back on all the steps because really, the projects are a lot of work and steps. I mean I don’t just tell the boys “Off you go and make a Powerpoint” and they get to work.

Prior to completing this project, the boys had worked in groups to re-write the story from the unit we had completed, using their imagination and creativity to personalise the play.

Using those sports discussed in their group stories as a starting point, they then worked to make a PowerPoint presentation about how to play each of these three sports.

Their presentation had to include:

  • Text (from the script)
  • Images (from Creative Commons)
  • Audio (voice recordings)

Here’s an excerpt of the boys’ own words retracing the steps of their project using Creative Commons Search.

We learned about copyright ©
Why? To be aware of what is and isn’t ok to use according to the copyright on an image/ music/ videos etc…
Why is it important to know about copyright?

  • Because respecting copyright is doing the right thing.
  • Because everything that lives on the Internet isn’t just there for us to use, some of it is protected.  It’s protected so that other people can’t use your work to make money off something they didn’t create.
  • Because it’s not fair to take credit for something you didn’t do, not fair to make a profit from someone else’s work.
  • Not respecting copyright is not legal.
  • In a classroom situation, we don’t have to worry too much because our work is just for us, not commercial but once we are working in the real world, it does matter.
  • So we can teach others about copyright – pass it on and have more people doing the right thing.
  • So that we can develop good habits when we are working online.

All this is from the boys themselves, and I think this demonstrated a pretty decent understanding of why we need to be aware of copyright and why it’s important to “do the right thing”.

At the end of the reflection, I asked the boys to tell me about any specific challenges they had (with the entire project, not just with using the Creative Commons Search tool) and here’s some of their comments relating to using images from CC:

“Getting the URL the first time was hard”
“Following the instructions for how to list the source of the image (there were a lot of steps) was challenging”
“Making the links was hard because there were a lot of steps”
“The most challenging part was searching the images because there was less of a selection [than Google Images]”
“Making the links was hard (even with instructions)”
“Making the links was challenging because it was complicated with copying and pasting the URLs then making them look neat”
“The steps to making links were complicated.”

Ok, so MY learning from this activity shows me that:

  1. I need to find an easier, more clear way to explain the steps of making links.
  2. Very few boys complained about the smaller selection of images available in Creative Commons Search.

Interesting that so many boys found the “link creating” to correctly source their images so challenging but it just proves that it’s something they just need a little more practice in. Goodness knows that I create dozens of links in all kinds of documents every day so it’s definitely something that will be useful for them to know.

A suivre… 

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?

 

Ok, well technically…

 

it’s not the end of this week yet (as I pledged I would write before the end of this week in my last post) – but I am cutting it close… Last week at the Face 2 Face session at MaRS, I was definitely feeling under the weather and it turned into a bad, bad cold that I still can’t shake, so I have not done as much work on my Cohort thinking as I would have liked to, however, it doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking, bookmarking on Diigo and reading…  Since Garth said “it’s enough” to focus on one area of best practices for digital citizenship in the classroom, I am sticking with my original idea of looking at copyright and how to teach best practices surrounding the area of image use to elementary school students (and teachers!).

Immediate steps to take:

  1. Figure out when and why teachers/ students in Grades 3-6 are using images they find online
  2. Once I have figured out 1. it will be easy to take a sample project from each grade and search for copyright-free images myself – work through the steps myself and document them so that I have some do-able takeaway ideas for these teachers.
  3. Continue reading on the subject. Do I write my notes in my blog or do I annotate them in Diigo? I feel it might be useful to use Diigo for keeping track of notes for now – since I am sharing these articles with Cohort 21 and the RSGC Grades 3-6 group I have created  so we can share articles etc… internally at school and keep everything in one place (it’s been a little bit of a slow uptake but I think that once I start populating the group’s space with useful articles, they will start to slowly come around and remember to use it to bookmark, as well as go to for reading material).
  4. Finish watching that webinar I mentioned in a previous post (I still haven’t got around to finishing it!). Take notes. Post them here.

And that’s about enough. Baby steps.

And I can’t post without a photo, right? So here’s something delicious for you:

Slice of Paris Brest on eatlivetravelwrite.comYes it’s a Paris-Brest. Click on the image to read about my trials and tribulations making it!