We can either see this as an opportunity to innovate and improve learning…or we can just go on with business as usual.

I recently gave a short talk about this at SXSWedu. Here it is. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

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But what to do when your students want to rip their favorite CDs to include music in their project? If you are posting the work online, this probably doesn’t fall under “fair use,” and it is important to model good copyright adherence with our students.

Creative Commons and open music to the rescue! There is now a wealth of open-licensed music that you and your students can use in your projects.

I love the sites ccMixter (contemporary; note that there is a small amount of music here with “adult language” but this site is not blocked in most schools) and MusOpen (classical) for this, but if you’d like to give students a little more limited selection of music to streamline the time they spend on it, we’ve set up this page with a limited selection of open-licensed music that you can use for free and legally for any student work.

Make sure to have your students attribute the source for any works they use, including music. For these music files, just right-click the mp3 file and view properties to see the source and license details.

Enjoy! And if there are any particular types of music you’d like to see added, let us know.

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As a part of a project in which students are writing poems to be included in a collected ebook, I had the opportunity this week to teach several groups of middle school students about copyright and open content. (I am often frustrated by teachers telling kids to “just get any image from Google to include in your Powerpoint/Word doc.”)

Facilitating this discussion with kids was tremendously enjoyable and thought-provoking. I am sure that I learned as much as they did (and I think they learned a lot).

Here are a few of my big take-aways:

1. Relevance leads to critical thinking and engaged learning. Copyright is a topic that is immediately relevant to kids — as a result, they were highly interested and had a ton of questions, comments, and thoughts. While they were engaged, I was able to insert other topics from math, writing, and reading. I think this is a key to improving learning (and it doesn’t flow naturally from a textbook or a pacing guide).

2. In general, kids want to be legal. They are, however, seriously uninformed. (When asked about what they knew about copyright, many confused it with plagiarism. They think this is a what-I-can-do-in-school issue rather than a legal issue.) They had many questions about what they needed to do to be legal.

3. The filesharing tools these kids use (almost universally) are Lime Wire and Photobucket. For those not in the know, Lime Wire is P2P file sharing software, apparently used by kids for exchanging music illegally (being used as the new Napster or Grokster). I believed most of the kids when they told me that they didn’t understand the legal issues involved with this. Their big concern with the service: viruses.

4. Most kids were not aware of the fundamental premise of Wikipedia: that anyone can edit it. This was shocking to me. When they understood this, they found it very empowering. (Together, we edited an article about their school district — something that you’d never find on Encarta or EB.) This led to a very sophisticated discussion about the pros and cons of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit. These kids got it a lot faster than most adults. We also talked about vandalism, wikispam, and version control.

5. Once the students understood the basics of copyright and open content, they quickly began discussing some pretty high level concepts about intellectual property. Unprovoked by me, they asked about financial issues, transference of copyright, IP address tracking, use of personal images (image release issues), paparazzi photos, parodies (as they relate to fair use), and lots more. It was phenomenal.

6. Kids are all over Firefox and view it as a better browser.

7. They were not familiar with the term “open source.” On the other hand, they expressed a universal contempt for Microsoft (to an extent that I found a little scary, but what a force for the OER community to harness).

8. Only one kid out of about 150 had ever heard of Creative Commons. How had he heard of it? YouTube.

9. They enjoyed finding open content that is legal to use in their projects. They were surprisingly adept at finding and understanding the licenses (CC, GFDL, public domain) and at including appropriate credits for the pieces used in their own work.

10. Kids who often appear bored and lacking in critical thinking and articulate communication skills suddenly seem like geniuses when they are discussing something that matters to them.
———–
What fun! My mind is still reeling at all the epiphanies I had during these few days.

| View | Upload your own

[For a lesson plan and accompanying resources for this, visit www.tinyurl.com/5qahht.]

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That’s very exciting. If you’ve heard me speaklately, you know that I am a very big advocate of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. I believe that this movement coupled with massive collaboration has the opportunity to reshape education by providing valuable resources needed to differentiate instruction.

Stay tuned for more info on this as it develops.

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Some of the video is from NASA and other government sources, but the site is much better organized and easier to search than most government sites.

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So….I created my own digital version of this session for folks to download:

Video version (streaming, for viewing in a browser; loads faster, but lower quality)

If anyone is interested in a higher resolution version to share with folks who weren’t able to attend, email me, and I’ll try to send you a CD.

For those who are interested, I audio recorded this with a very inexpensive Olympus WS-100 pocket recorder. I edited the audio in Audacity and brought it all into Windows Movie Maker for editing. The visuals included exported jpgs from my presentation slides and screen-capture videos made with Camstudio. I used HandShare to create the Palm movies (which is the same software I used to present). Creating the whole thing took about 4 hours.

It was a lot of fun making this and was a good way to reflect on my own style of presenting (and hopefully refine it for upcoming events).

I hope this is a useful resource for you all.

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If you are looking for images to use in presentations, copyleft content offers you a legal option for free content. If you are creating content, consider sharing it with others under a copyleft agreement.

My newest podcast features a sampling of great copyleft visual resources, like clip art, photos, and video. (If you missed it, the last show was on audio resources.) Both of these shows were really fun to produce (and a lot of work to edit, but that’s part of the fun).

Here is a list of copyleft sources to look at:

Clipart
* Open Clip Art Library [Note: This site is in transition, but this art is also downloadable from other sites.]
* Wikimedia Commons

Photos
* Wikimedia Commons
* The Open Photo Project
* morgueFile
* Stock.XCHNG
* Flickr
* NASA
* Library of Congress

Video and animation
* Wikimedia Commons
* NASA’s Earth Observatory [lets you build your own custom animations]
* Internet Archive

Music
* ccMixter
* Wikimedia Commons music
* Internet Archive (wide variety of stuff here, not all copyleft)
* Partners in Rhyme
* MusOpen

Spoken word
* Spoken Wikipedia
* Library of Congress
* Voice of America
* Internet Archive (wide variety of stuff here, not all copyleft)

Sound Effects
* The Freesound Project
* Partners in Rhyme
* US Fish and Wildlife Service (animal sounds)

Search engines for other copyleft content
* Creative Commons
* Wikimedia Commons
* Common Content
* ibiblio

At some point in the future, I’ll do another podcast on copyleft-licensed educational resources. Hope you enjoy!

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The next show will feature similar copyleft visual content (photos, clip art, videos). I’m also presenting a session called “Using Mobile Technology to Differentiate and Enrich Instruction” at NECC. This presentation will include how to create and use this kind of content. If you’re at NECC, stop by and say hi!

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I love Wikipedia and the collaborative approach to creation that it represents, but as with any information resource, Wikipedia is not all things to all people. One area where it is problematic for schools is that it contains some content that is not child appropriate. Also, as an “open environment” it is always changing…which is potentially both good and bad.

To address this, SOS Children and a group of dedicated volunteers have now launched Wikipedia for Schools. This is a subset of the best Wikipedia articles that are child-friendly and educationally-oriented and have been correlated to the UK National Curriculum. It is “frozen” so that vandalism, etc. are not concerns, and you can even download it as a DVD. What a great project!

With the increasing wealth of “copyleft” and Open Source content that’s out there, I’ve been thinking about a variety of potential projects like this. Examples include adapting Wiktionary for student use (especially on mobile devices), creating a CD of Open Source art, photos, video and music for student project creation, organizing a list of public domain ebooks by reading level, and more.

There is so much value in this content and providing it in a monitored, safe environment and format would help speed its adoption. It would definitely take a big group of volunteers to work on it though. Would free screened resources like this be of interest to your school? Would you be interested in helping put it together?

[Image of Wikipedia logo is a registered trademark of Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.]

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