A couple of sentences about Narrative Writing

I am having a great experience of working on a collaborative unit in Middle School.
Ms. Sullivan is teaching his students to write narratives and I bring an expertise as librarian.

I knew I could bring an ample of examples from classical and modern authors' works to show students how to develop real or imagined experiences or events.
I knew that students needed help with descriptive  vocabulary to illustrate characters and show their attitudes.
I knew we would review a dialog, one of the important narrative techniques  (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.6.3). 

It wasn't new to me that students model teacher's example and start little. The class was reminded  about three basic rules of writing a narrative:

• Know your audience

• Have a story in mind- think of a character, setting, a problem and a resolution. Leave your audience with a lesson, an idea, or image.

• Describe: show rather than tell, let the reader hear, feel, smell, taste, and see your story. Provide details.

A novel Silver Branch by Rosemary Sutcliff was my discovery.  Students recalled the sequence of the events and could tell the story spontaneously! The novel is an anthology of descriptive vocabulary, and students use the words to characterize actions, places, objects, and emotions.

A collection of descriptive words created in Symbaloo helped students to find synonyms and compose engaging narratives.

Crediting sources: Creative Works

One of the essential skills every 21^st century learner should practice is to respect intellectual property. 

Educators often talk to students about plagiarism and remind them to give credits to information they have used. However,  we often omit teaching  students to give credits to other creative use media without consideration of their copyright. For example, images, music, and videos used in student works miss credits to their creators.

Students mash up media into their presentations thus creating their own works that also
should be copyright protected. Show them how to choose the type of the license on Creative Commons, an open source,  depository of creative works available for others.

Not every image found on the Web is available for reuse.  By default, Google searches everything. However, if you set up Google Images - Search Tools – Usage Rights on Labeled for Reuse, you will limit your searches to specific use rights, including for commercial/non-commercial use, reuse with modification and other options.

Also, there are many collections of copyright fair use images, music, sound effects and videos. Some of them are collected on Free Media Sources ais-sharing site. 

How to credit media:
Add "Credit" field and display it under the media that you upload to your work. 

Creative Commons

Public use of pictures:
Flickr Creative Commons - many people open their photos for public use. They license their pictures in Creative Commons under "Attribution - Non Commercial/No Derivatives License". Read more about different kinds of licenses in http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/

Are you confused: copyright and fair use.

Who doesn't use texts that include audio, video, and digital materials? How should we teach our students to use media legally? Do we ourselves demonstrate the appropriate way of including pictures and YouTube movies into our presentation?

Copyright and fair use are serious topics that we, the 21st century educators, want to understand and explain our students. To know what exactly is happening in this area is the task of librarians. We need to clearly understand what copyright and fair use are because in other way we are no help to the teachers, we cannot show students how to deal with the media properly, we don't want to share our works or come up with our own rules that are much more strict than the real ones and again, we limit our productiveness and effectiveness.

Renee Hobbs (School of Communications and Theater Temple University) clarifies on fair use and copyright issues:

• Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
• Copyright Clarity: How Fair Use Supports Digital Learning