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developed as a resource for teachers and students who are interested in how multimedia can be integrated into a variety of educational activities. The site was created by faculty members and graduate students in the Instructional Technology program in the University of Houston College of Education.
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a copyright-friendly image library for teachers and students. The Pics4Learning collection consists of thousands of images that have been donated by students, teachers, and amateur photographers.
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a collection of tools, resources, lesson plans, and printables created and maintained by Google for teacher use.
Includes a teacher’s guide to Google Tools for Your Classroom and examples of ways that educators are using these tools in the classroom. Visitors can sign up for a quarterly email newsletter and read the Google blog for educators, Infinite Thinking Machine.
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a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.
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A comprehensive program for teachers that includes a 13-page PDF guidebook and a library of free curricula that helps teachers of all grades and subject areas incorporate copyright education into existing lesson plans.
Competing copyright curricula
Published 24 June, 2009 Information literacy , edTech , media Leave a CommentTags: copyright, fair use, mediaLiteracy, participatoryCulture, studentEngagement, teacherLearner, teachers
A recent eSchoolNews article about dueling copyright curricula couldn’t have surfaced at a more opportune time, seeing as how I literally just days before had utilized some materials from one of the curriculums in question.
On the one hand, the Copyright Alliance Education Foundation (CAEF) recently published Think First, Copy Later, seen by some as slanted toward the interests of copyright owners.
On the other hand, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), unveiled Teaching Copyright. The EFF is characterized as an advocacy group that serves the interests of users and consumers of digital media.
Admittedly, I was not aware of the CAEF curriculum when I recently selected and distributed some of the EFF’s support documents to a group of pre-service teachers at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. But I am inspired by the prospect of having access to and using “dueling curricula,” if and when I teach about copyright again in the future.
What an opportunity for teachers to exercise professional discernment! What an opportunity for students to see copyright law presented from two different perspectives — owner versus user, industry versus consumer! What an opportunity to engage higher-order thinking and some good, old media literacy skills, such as evaluating audience, authorship, message, and meaning!
Teachers need these resources now more than ever. It was not too long ago that teacher training on the vagaries of fair use doctrine were conducted in the faculty workroom, usually between classes, as we waited in line at the photocopier. We traded in stories, myths, and half-truths and competed for bragging rights to the title of “Greatest Copyright Infringer.” We made half-joking references to a sinister, Gestapo-like “Copyright Police” waiting in the wings. (I know. I was one of those teachers.)
The surge of web-based information and communication technologies makes it easier than ever to facilitate content creation and sharing in our classrooms, but we must first be equipped to engage students in conversation about content creation that is safe, ethical, and legal.
The alternative is to do nothing for fear of violating the law. This phenomenon was documented by Hobbs, Jaszi, and Aufderheide in their 2007 report for the Center for Social Media, The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy. In 2008 the Center published the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education, which states that fear and confusion about copyright:
detracts from the quality of teaching. Lack of clarity reduces learning and limits the ability to use digital tools. Some educators close their classroom doors and hide what they fear is infringement; others hyper-comply with imagined rules that are far stricter than the law requires, limiting the effectiveness of their teaching and their students’ learning.
Check out the accompanying video:
links for 2009-06-22
Published 22 June, 2009 Information literacy , Links to think about , edTech Leave a Comment-
provides a brief history and overview of copyright law and how advances in digital technology have also advanced misunderstanding of how copyright law works. The second half of the blog post is a discussion of the online copyright initiative called Creative Commons.
Featured student blog: meet Ann
Published 21 June, 2009 Information literacy , edTech Leave a CommentTags: collaboration, edublogs, mentoring, reflection, teacherLearner, teachers, uTenn
Cross-posted at Fireside Learning and Classroom 2.0.
Many teachers shy away from contemporary music. Why? It could be because their own teachers did the same.
That quote comes from Ann, an aspiring music educator at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. She and 14 other pre-service teachers are enrolled in a section of IT486, Intro to Instructional Computing, that I am teaching this summer. The course examines how to use technology to support teaching and learning and is designed to prepare novice teachers to integrate a variety of computer-based technologies.
One aspect of the course design that I really enjoy and value is the blog for reflective journaling. This is a required component. During the first week of the course, each student signed up for a blog at Google’s Blogger. They were given a certain amount of license in the look and feel of the blog, but the overarching rationale for the pre-service teacher blog is the same: to develop and practice the reflective process. (More on that later.)
But why blend an introspective mode of writing such as journal writing with a public medium such as blogs?
As Christopher Sessums maintains:
Collaborative weblogs promote the idea of learners as creators of knowledge, not merely consumers of information. A collaborative environment like the one I’m suggesting can allow peers to be seen as valuable sources of knowledge and ideas; a connection that participants can rely on beyond any formal classroom structure, i.e., collaboration leading to a community of interest.
So to that end, I have been making readerly comments on each pre-service teacher’s blog, and I am encouraging the class to follow, read, and comment on each others’ blogs.
And now, to go a step further, I seek to shine a spotlight (or, in the case of our music major, “sound a trumpet”) on some provocative posts in hopes of inducting our novice edubloggers into some of the wonderfully generous and nurturing networks of teacher/learners that have supported me in the past — communities such as Fireside Learning and Classroom 2.0.
Ann’s commentary on the state of music education strikes a chord because she describes a phenomenon that transcends content area and grade level: teachers tend to teach in the manner in which they were taught. Why is this so? How do we press forward into new realms of teaching and learning and resist falling back on tired and familiar practices that have outlived their effectiveness for today’s learners?
What do you think? I invite you to visit Ann’s blog and share your thoughts and feedback with her.
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This is a complete archive of the 2008 K-12 Online Conference presentations. An excellent resource of slideshows, virtual tours, podcasts, and keynotes all about the read/write web.
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a slideshow created by Renee Hobbs. Suitable as a 10-minute intro to copyright and fair use "best practices" in the classroom.
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The mission of the Media Education Lab at Temple University is to improve media literacy education through scholarship and community service. They provide multimedia curriculum resources for K-12 media literacy education. At the "Teaching Resources" page, educators can access an extensive collection of free resources for teaching about media, technology, copyright, and fair use.
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provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law.
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a web-based mind-mapping tool that enables real-time collaboration and "global" brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from anywhere. In brainstorming mode, users from around the world (or just in different rooms) can simultaneously work on the same mind map and see each other's changes as they happen.
