Teachers and their students are moving more and more online. Kids are blogging their learning as an excellent way to build confidence, reflect and gather feedback. Schools are showcasing the best of their students’ work on their websites.and the educational world is benefiting from a collaborative worldwide connections.

That’s all exciting and positive but we have one important question:
Who owns the material and it’s components when it’s published?

This is where we must all be careful. A quick Google search will find a growing number of cases where people have sought damages for even single images republished on both blogs and social media like Twitter. This link tells the story of a bad photo taken on a phone that was found on Google and used In a blog Post resulting in an $8000 out of court settlement. Every photo is owned by the photographer automatically and if you choose the wrong image you can loose out substantially.

So let’s look at how we should manage this and what schools can to to encourage staff and students to understand and use licensing.

Creative Commons is an organisation that manages and promotes a set of globally recognised licences for original creative works, such as any photo taken. It helps you set up licences for material but also helps you find and use the correct material that is truly ok to use in school work.

When teachers and students produce new material that they will be publishing online they will normally be happy for people to share it but need to be specific about what is and isn’t ok. For example, all my material on my blog is free to use but I I have embedded the license on my home page that notifies people they have to credit me, not make money and repeat my licence on their copy.

Here’s a quick summary of the options for school work.

Finding free images and giving credit

On the Creative Commons Search Page you can choose from a number of known sites including Google and Flickr and it will automatically apply the sites’ filters to locate related images that are nominated by the owner as ok to use. One permanent rule is that you will always be expected to credit the owner by name and in the case of publishing online, this will imply a link to their profile. I got this image of a wheat field from Flickr (The Youtube for Photos). Flickr is a great site for safe image searching as it has built Creative Commons into the upload process for all photographers.

Here is the Photo Credit to Kevin Lallier

Practice what you preach.

How can schools not only inform but encourage the school community to start using licensing and working safely to avoid being prosecuted?

In New Zealand a number of schools have officially signed up as Creative Commons schools and have Written policies that inform teachers that their classroom material, although owned by the school is free to share with the agreed Creative commons license badges attached. This is a much more relevant and 21st century approach to copyright and sharing. It also helps any school teaching digital citizenship practice what they preach.

The teachers are then applying Creative Commons, discussing copyright and students can see the licenses on a daily basis. This helps prepare the whole school community for a rapidly changing online world where the legal ramifications are being automated by companies and people need to be prepared.

Understanding what is and isn;t ok is a crucial skill for all to learn and I hope this information helps schools get more confident with publishing material online.

Here’s a Slideshow I used when talking through this on TeachTechPlay in October 2014.