Sunday, February 23, 2014

What's Fair to Use


The following is a description of an online unit that I am working on with my colleague, Tim Flanagan.



A multimodal tutorial unit engaging students in respecting copyright law and guiding them to discern what resources they can freely use in their work.





Where We’re At

We are well under way in the design of our multimodal learning tutorial unit. We are currently applying and developing universal design elements to our unit.  We have decided on our goal and learning objectives. We expect these will evolve as we continue to design and develop our unit. We are also in the process of matching and checking CCSS as they relate to our unit. We have built a page in the TechTools website and have started adding resources that will be useful to both teachers and students using this unit. The resources include videos and websites that explain the related topics.   We have begun design of student materials that will help students in their learning and in applying what they have learned.

Unit Goals
  1. Students will understand the rules of Copyright.  
  2. Students will learn how to find materials that are free to use through  Fair Use, Creative Commons licensing, and the Public Domain.
  3. Students will learn how to provide attribution for the sources they use.
Objectives
Students will:
  • Understand the purpose of copyright materials.
  • Identify the characteristics of copyright materials, Public Domain, and Fair Use.
  • Explain the different Creative Commons licensing options.
  • Locate free-to-use sources.
  • Discuss and defend whether materials are free to use.
  • Learn how to document their sources.
  • Create a web page of free-to-use materials and provide attribution of sources.

Where We’re Headed
We have outlined our ideas for the remainder of this task of building a multimodal unit.   In the coming weeks, we will focus on the following:
  • Continue to build our webpage on the Digital Texts and Tools website.  Decide on a final layout of the page.
  • Add resources and develop student learning activities for each of the following sections of the module:  Creative Commons, Finding Sources that are Free to Use, and Putting it into Practice.
  • Create multimodal tutorials for finding sources that are free to use and learning about Creative Commons.
  • Decide on how to address the topic of Attribution.  How specific do we need to be?  Should we create a separate section for it on the website?
  • Write instructions and criteria for a final product.  Students will be asked to create a Glogster page with materials that are free to use and provide attribution for their sources.
  • Create an evaluation tool for teachers to use to measure student progress toward the learning objectives.
  • Develop and organize the Teacher section of our web page.  
We have both gained a deeper understanding of this topic through this research.  It is a topic that many teachers shy away from since it can be difficult to understand and the rules of copyright and fair use change as new technologies are developed.  We hope that our learning module will make this topic accessible to teachers and students so that they can become competent and responsible digital citizens.

cc image from Wikimedia Commons

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