As I work with teachers across the country, I find that very few have heard of Creative Commons licensing, and this is alarming to me. Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. Educators MUST be aware of Creative Commons and teach students about it as they use images, sounds, and other multimedia components to help make up their own multimedia projects.
Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyleft movement, which seeks to support the building of a richer public domain by providing an alternative to the automatic "all rights reserved" copyright. When creators license their media with creative commons "some rights reserved" licensing, students (and adults) have the freedom to include the media/content in their own projects without breaking copyright laws.
For example, I take a lot of pictures and share them on Flickr with a Creative Commons license. I welcome others to use my photos, as long as they give me credit and don't make money as a result. My photos have a "
There are six Creative Commons licenses. Learn about them here. It's easy to pick the appropriate license by using a wizard found here, answering a couple of questions about whether you are okay with your work being used for commercial purposes and whether you are okay with it being modified/remixed.
If you are looking for content to use in your own projects, consider going to the Creative Commons Image Search Webpage or Flickr's Creative Commons search page.
This two minute video created by Justin Cone, called "Building on the Past," was the winner of the CC Moving Images Contest. It demonstrates what Creative Commons is, how it works, in a clever way. Enjoy!
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