Tag Archives: digital citizenship

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!

 

#C21actionplan – next steps

you can do hard things

Feeling *slightly* overwhelmed – in the best way possible – after today’s Face 2 Face session at MaRSDD but taking away SO MUCH inspiration.  I’m coming away thinking that the theme for my action plan is a little bit… weak compared to some of the amazing ideas I heard today and I am thinking I might need to change course a little.

Immediate next steps

  • I want to explore Padlet (this is nothing to do with my action plan but I have a fairly immediate use for it in one of my classes). I’m going to look at the boys using it to create a very quick presentation with information they have already written instead of the arduous task of creating a Powerpoint or Keynote presentation (I know from experience that this takes longer than I have right now).
  • I need to figure out MY definition of digital citizenship.
  • I need to figure out which area of digital citizenship I want to explore for my project. I had initially thought that I’d look at this:

  • but now I think I might have to broaden this plan – is it “enough”?

I’m going to take the weekend to ponder this and I’ll post my (re)thinking before the end of next week. Because

(steps to take in the near future)

  • I pledge to post my thought process much more often between now and April. Writing helps me figure stuff out. And after today, it looks like I have some big thinking to do.

Action plan – some thoughts

Typewriter

Image via Flickr Creative Commons (Stan Wiechers)

So here we are again, a few days away from the next Cohort 21 Face to Face session and here are a few of us scrambling to get out an “Action Plan” or at least some semblance of one. I won’t lie, I feel (once again) that I have let myself down a little by not posting regularly here, by not being as active on Twitter in this profile as I am in that profile and for generally well, taking a break through December. I even, you know, took a complete work holiday over Christmas (I was in Australia visiting my family and it just wasn’t conducive to getting anything done (no, not even the mind numbing 22 hours in the air!).

But that doesn’t mean I have been neglecting my Action Plan (yes, I think it needs capital letters!) – no – I’ve actually done a LOT of thinking about it and it’s changing the way I am doing (and seeing) a lot of things.

Digital citizenship is the area I am interested in exploring but it certainly is a great big world of questions out there.  As I teach Grades 3-6 only, I have chosen to make my focus those grades and, more specifically, the issue of copyright.  We hear so often about plagiarism when i comes to the use of other people’s words without permission yet every single day I see evidence of lack of knowledge about image copyright – so that’s where my focus will be.  I know myself and my limitations and I feel a small project like this where I am able to make some use-able, do-able recommendations to my colleagues is a worthy first step into the Wild West that is the land of figuring out what it means to be a good digital citizen.

So, yeah, I’ve been compiling information as I work towards that.

My Diigo list of articles I’m bookmarking about Digital Citizenship (to read and re-read)

I joined The International Society for Technology in Education and have been dipping into their excellent Webinar Archive including one called “How to make your students good digital citizens” which is on my list of things to do this week (it’s an hour long webinar and I don’t know about you all but I can’t watch something like this at work – I don’t have a classroom of my own and there are very few quiet spaces I can work uninterrupted – and when I get home, sometimes I am a little too tired to concentrate on a “work show” for long) before our session at MaRS on Friday.

I’ve enrolled in a webinar in March entitled Empowering Our Students to Be Digital Citizens) presented by Kelly Mendoza, professional developer with Common Sense Media, California – which has a whole slew of info on this topic here) because it sounded like it touched on a little of everything I need to know background-wise in order to launch into even a small-scale study.

As schools continue to integrate technology, they face increasing challenges with behavioral and ethical issues such as cyberbullying, inappropriate sharing and plagiarism. To meet these challenges, educators must teach digital citizenship, an essential digital age skill that students need to become safe, responsible and respectful participants in a digital world.

I’ve also got this huge document about the Nine Elements of Digital Citizenship to wade through read as a background resource to support my thinking and then there’s Garth’s recent post about his own action plan to do with a digital citizenship curriculum which led me to a document by the Ministry of Education entitled A Shifting Landscape: Pedagogy, Technology, and the New Terrain of Innovation in a Digital World… and there goes the Internet again – being that black hole of endlessly engaging information (if you know where to look!) that it does so well…

So much info to explore and so little time but so much impact even a small amount of reading can have on one’s classroom practice and everyday life. I’m looking forward to steering my Action Plan in the right direction over the next little while. I think it’s going places  – yes, I am already thinking about what Action Plan I could do for a future Cohort 21 because you know, one thing leads to another…