Richardson (2010) and the Flickr Web site elaborate well on the use and application of the Creative Commons (CC) license, regarding photos, magazines covers, and image works. My question: are worksheets that are stored on Wiki blog sites collected from other education Web sites fair to use? The use of a Wiki site that is not open to the public but used to share such content with teachers and students is not so clear with the Fair Use laws. According to Education Blogger Ronnie Burt (2012) textbooks or curricula resources fall under the fair use policy for photocopying for classroom use, however “it most likely isn’t going to allow you to make a PDF document and put it on your class blog or website” for students to download and print themselves.
The Creative Commons license permits creators’ work to be used by others. The CC logo is posted on works and serves as a notice of permission to use work with an accompanied attribute. An attribution requires appropriate creator credit, a link to the license, and indication of any changes that were made to the work. Because sheltered instruction for language acquisition requires images to accompany instructional content and build a scaffold for understanding, I frequently use online images and photographs that have the cc logo. Recently I began tagging the attributes to these images for loading to my Wiki site. Images for ESOL instruction is a must-have and resources, such as Flickr and Robertstech.com, make it so easy to find items. Roberts’ site has a large collection of images at no cost as long as: 1) the use is not for commercial purposes, 2) the image isn’t modified or used as part of another work, and 3) the usage includes credit to Roberts and with a link to the website where the image appears.
Roberts permits commercial uses via permission request and for a user fee. Until I am catch up with making tags I am only sharing some of my original work on my Wiki site. I have hundreds of digital images that belong to me that reflect my content instruction, but sharing has a market teachers should all also consider. For this assignment I took a photograph at home from my backdoor of the snow melt and posted it for the public on Flickr.
Flickr
My image files are not sufficiently organized, and I am thrilled about this new tool, Flickr. Flickr allows me to not only search and choose from its vast image collection, it allows me to tag and store my work online. For this assignment I uploaded a shot taken from my backdoor. I call this picture CatastrophicThursdayMelt. Flickr allows me to keep my work private, with a public share option. For this image I followed the prompts and clicks to make it public with Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license. The best part about Flickr is that I am using the free version and I can upload up to 1 terabyte - that’s a trillion bytes of image data! Should I need additional add-on services, I can join Flickr’s subscription version for a fee.
Richardson (2010) makes sharing and Flickr sound like an everyday event; I counsel users to be cautious of recording events and sharing pictures for class instruction. My experience as an enthusiastic photographer and an ESOL content instructor includes a few missteps. In a culturally diverse environment keep in mind that many faiths do not permit photography or recording video of individuals or any events. Many times I am required to get permission from everyone present, even if I am not including identifiable faces. Much of my photography is limited to recording images of objects and demonstrations that only show fingers and hands using lab tools and even this practice requires permission for all that are present.
In the near future I want to use Flickr and my HTML coding skills to make some interactive language online content. Having my students’ first languages as part of an online assignment would really be awesome and boost class participation.
References
Burt, R. (2012) The Educator’s Guide to Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons, Edblogger. Retrieved at: http://theedublogger.com/2012/02/09/the-educators-guide-to-copyright-fair-use-and-creative-commons/
Richardson, W. (2010). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful Web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.