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. 

Literacy in a digital world

An article about 21 century literacy in digital age was published in ReadWriteThink blog. Traci Gardner highlights that literacy skills nowadays are more complicated than just changing formats of texts, from print one to electronic. She write that "it’s not about reading that dog-eared copy of Jane Eyre on some electronic gadget. It’s about a completely re-thought notion of what we read and how we read". Our students read a variety of texts, often not recognizing that some of the documents they read, view or listen are texts. When creating lists of significant texts students use they realize what literacies they need to accquire. Multimedia literacy, once being not necessary to be introduced, now became an essential part of education. Read more about defining reading in digital age on the ReadWriteThink (NCTE) web page.