As you've heard me mention before (and you'll hear me mention again and again), now that students have Google accounts and Chromebooks, digital citizenship needs to be a focus across grade levels and subject areas. Any chance we get to reinforce ways for our students to be good digital citizens, we need to seize that opportunity!
One thing that is commonly done in schools -- and done improperly -- is searching for and using images found online. (This falls under the theme of understanding digital law as well as digital rights and responsibilities.) When they need an image for a school project, most students simply do a Google search for an image, find what they want, and plop that image into their report, web page, presentation, etc. But the problem with that is that copyright and usage rights are being ignored. While this might not seem like such a big deal in 4th grade, it can be a more significant issue when those kids grow up and improperly use copyrighted materials on a college or work project. Just like we teach students to respect another person's physical property (don't take Kelly's crayons, don't use Michael's calculator without asking him first), we need to teach students to respect others' digital property.
Many moons ago, I put together a quick how-to document about searching for images that might be helpful. Feel free to share this with kids. I can even come in and do a quick mini-lesson with your class on this!
Please take every opportunity you can to reinforce digital citizenship to our students, including all the great images available for our kids to use at school!
Updated October 16, 2019
Thanks, great article and reference. We need to teach them to stay safe while opening up their creative minds!
ReplyDeleteWell said Renee! Another good resource is the Creative Commons website. It has a resource like a search engine which allows someone to search for something that can be uses for commercial purposes or modified/adapted/built upon:
ReplyDeletehttps://search.creativecommons.org/?query=