How 2 understand Creative Commons Licensing

Teachers spend a lot of time and energy worrying about plagiarism of the written word. Schools invest money in services like turnitin.com, sentenceworks.com and other services that scan written documents for plagiarism.

But what about visual plagiarism?

What do you do when you need a picture of some thing? Probably google the keywords, click on "images" and download the best thing that pops up. But did you ever notice the little warning that "this image might be subject to copywright"? Maybe you noticed, but do you know what it means?

What it means is that you've probably broken the law by using pictures you didn't have the right to use. It probably also means that your students have done the same thing.

SO WHAT DO I DO ABOUT IT???

The easiest thing to do is do your search through the creative commons service, which was created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Creative Commons is a way for normal people to lay claim to things they have created, and to specify how others are allowed to use it (I'll blog a lot more about this later - for now, here's a quick youtube video about it)

The search website is here and this is what it looks like:



When you type in your keyword(s) - notice the two checkboxes where you can tell the search engine what you want to be able to do with the image - checking both will get you the images that have the most permissive rights.

Then you check each tab to see what people have put out there - these are the things that are OK to use.

How 2 make embeddable screen shots and even movies

This one involves some software that you have to install on your computer - but it's free, and free is a good price.

It's also AWESOME and so handy I can't believe I survived before discovering it.

www.jingproject.com

I use this to create virtually all of the screen-shots that I post on this blog - mostly because of the awesome ability to instantly generate imbed code. The image itself is posted on Jing's website, and the embed code is saved to my clipboard.

You can download files too, but so far I've only used the embed code generator - there's a tiny bit of work involved in creating a button to generate embed code, but the help information walks you right through it.

You can also draw a screen-shot box and record a video clip of what you're doing on the screen. If you have a microphone on your computer, it will record your voice as you describe what you're doing. Again, you can tell it to generate imbed code and you get something like this:



There's a video on the jing site that goes into more detail - but I can promise you, once you start playing with this, you will use it for EVERYTHING!!!