Teach Students About Creative Commons: 15+ Resources
Included in the Digital Tips Advent Calendar and part of the Effective Technology Integration category
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination … Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it.” ~ Jim Jarmusch
Your students will often use images, music, and content created by other individuals. Part of teaching our learners digital citizenship, is showing them how to respect copyright and how to properly cite where they found the content they use. Creative Common licensing is a simple way for people to define how their content can be used and remixed. Below are a few ideas and resources to help you teach your learners about creative commons:
- Students can learn about Creative Commons licenses by watching this slideshow explaining Creative Commons. Creative Commons licenses grant permission to use an author’s work with proper attribution (meaning you have to credit the person who shared the image).
- You or your learners can create your own CC license with this license generator.
- Flickr- Go to the Flickr Advanced Search page. (Flickr.com –> click on search –> click on advanced search –> enter a keyword, like “animals”, scroll down and tick the box that says “search only in Creative Commons-licensed content”).
- FlickrCC- a website which will look for CC images on Flickr and give you the attribution. It is a faster option than the instructions above, but it isn’t always updated. Please click on the original image to make sure the attribution details are correct.
- Pics4Learning- Over 35000 images for educational purposes
- Wikimedia Commons (4 million images in the public domain)
- Free Images (6000 stock photos, and they require you to credit them as the source)
- World Images (80,000 photos from the California State University IMAGE project, under a non-commercial CC license)
- ELT Pics (Images taken by teachers for teachers, collected via Twitter and stored on Flickr, under a non-commercial CC license)
- PhotoPin (a search engine that finds Creative Commons images)
- Wylio- Search engine for CC images for bloggers
- CC Image Search Engine
- Compfight
- PhotoXpress offers 10 free stock images a day
- Hubspot Stock Images
- CC Mixter - my favorite site for CC music with a free app
- Free Music Archive
- Jamendo
- RoyaltyFreeMusic
- SoundBible
- FreeSound
Tech & Learning Newsletter
Tools and ideas to transform education. Sign up below.
Shelly Terrell is an education consultant, technology trainer, and author. Read more at teacherrebootcamp.com