IT @ ISM Tech Think Blog

According to ISM’s mission and our school-wide student goals, our mandate is to develop “effective communicators” and “responsible, caring and ethical contributors“. The NETS technology standards also commit us to developing digital citizens who “practice legal and ethical behavior” in their “use of information and technology“.

This may all sound well and good, but what does it mean in practice?

One aspect of digital citizenship refers to use of digital resources such as (online) text, music, images, video and more. Plagiarism is a concept most schools are familiar with, and we have (very) detailed policies for Academic Integrity in place here at ISM (in the MS and HS Student Handbooks), but how often do teachers actually look at these policies?

And what about use of all the new forms of media? Have your students ever handed in work with images they’ve just copied from the web without citing their source or asking for permission? Is this okay? Do you know what the rules are for using others’ material? For example, is it okay to take video from a VCD or music from a CD and put it in a video that will be posted on the Internet?

Although copyright and intellectual property for various forms of media is a complex and much debated issue, I believe, given our mission statement and our adoption of the NETS standards, that we as teachers have an obligation to model digital citizenship when in school, regardless of our personal viewpoints on these issues. Here are some (rhetorical) questions to highlight what I see as practical consequences for our school…

• Is it okay for teachers to promote buying illegal copies of videos (e.g. VCDs from Green Hills), whether explicitly during conversation or implicitly by showing them during class? If not, how do we address this topic in conversations with our students?
• Is it okay for teachers to rip music CDs and put the songs in Student Resources? Is this not the equivalent of creating a localized LimeWire for students and teachers to copy music from?
• Is it okay to encourage students to rip music from a CD to use in a project? Does the answer to this depend on where the project is posted, and if so, do you help your students understand the difference?
• When you tell students to get images online, do you teach them about copyright issues? Even if most publishers of online content are unlikely to mind educational, non-commercial use of their published resources, don’t we still owe it to the kids to teach them that there are cases when it is not okay to use just anything they may find in Google image search?

One good starting point for finding out more about these issues is to read about Creative Commons. According to Wikipedia, the Creative Commons licenses “enable copyright holders to grant some or all of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information“.

Here is a list of useful resources for learning about and/or finding (legally) free material online:

• Read about Creative Commons licensing at http://creativecommons.org/.
• Flickr is an excellent online image host, and if you search for images and sort them by “Most interesting”, you can find some truly astonishing images. However, limit your search to only find images that were intended for anyone to use: click Advanced Search and check off where it asks if you want to limit your search to images offered under a Creative Commons license. To learn more, go to http://flickr.com/creativecommons.
• This article at Presentation Zen has links to a number of free online image sources, many of which are very high resolution. I won’t include the entire list of links, but just want to highlight the Public Domain Pictures, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration picture gallery and the US National Archives gallery. The Presentation Zen article also includes links to many NASA and WWII and other historical image galleries.
• Download lots of freely available material from www.archive.org, including audio content, images and text. This site allows you to search for particular content types and genres - students will not find music from their favorite artists there, but there is plenty of quality content that can be used for a particular purpose, e.g. video projects.
• Finally, students are all familiar with Clip Art, but not everyone knows there is more than 150,000 free images and sounds available online at the Microsoft Office Clip Art site, including a great many high-quality images.