Teacher Challenge – 4

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Image Author Ines Pinto Source:  flickr Commons Atribution: Creative Commons

     This picture, posted in July 2007, as a creative commons attribution share alike, in Flickr photos, belongs to an album of 20 pictures, specially created for an exercise asked by Edublogs, during the 2008 Comment Challenge.

    In Step 7, we must understand, in order to make it clear for our students, that pictures and images on the web are not just free to use no matter how.

     Usually they are published explicitly under certain rules, whether they prevent us to use them without a special permission, as is the case of copyright, or they just are apparently not related to any kind of rule, as it is the case, for instance, of pictures of a hotel posted on its site, as in Pousada dos Girassóis, whose owner is the young author’s uncle.

     In these cases, we must either ask a written permission to publish the image as kindly offered by its author and rightly linked to its source. If no copyright signs are at sight, at least we must link to its source and name it. I usually do this when copying my student texts about public places or hotels they have been during holidays. I think hotels or other public places accept this kind of use of their pictures as a sort of publicity to them. However, I assume I take some risk by doing so.

   Once I asked the Hubble Site if I could post some of their Hubble pictures in order to explain how to change the personal pronouns according to their role in the sentence. Hubble site had the kindness of answering me not only to give the permission but also to ask for a link in order to include my work in their archive of educational items.

   In Edublogs-Pro, with the free access to Compfight, we can choose among thousands of pictures licensed under Creative Commons, which means that those pictures are kindly offered for us to use. There, my students often find what they had precisely imagined.

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     I use this creative commons license badge  in our wiki of resources at pbworks so that anyone who wishes can come and pick tests, exercises, writing suggestions, inspirational quotes  or  other kind of assessment tools. I’ve found that visitors from Brazil and Portuguese Speaking Africa take benefit or this sharing, which is the main point of using CC licenses.

   When my students and I can’t find what we are looking for in Compfight  we look in this wiki page where edublogs taught us to collect links to sites that offer creative common images

 In Step 7, I’ve learned that in sites as the Getty Open Content, all the digital images are available whether the Getty holds the rights to them or they belong to the public domain, in which case one must use the simple source credit: “digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program”.

     Thanks to the Challenge Team for the very useful lesson.

Inês P