Happy 4th of July Indiana!
SpokenText/Firefox and RSS: First this week, I’d like to make a correction/addition to something I blogged about on June 13th. On 6/13, I wrote about YakItToMe and the functionality it has to provide not only text to audio, but then to also podcast those audio files. I have since been informed that one of my other favorite Text to Audio free websites, www.spokentext.net, also offers this Podcast (RSS) functionality. I don’t know if this is a relatively new feature of spoken text or if I just missed it in the past, but I’m certainly glad that Mark from spokentext brought this to my attention and I hope many of you make use of it in your classrooms! While on this subject, I’d also like to point out that spokentext also has a Firefox extension that you can use to create audio files from anyplace you or your students happen to be visiting online. This is a very nice little feature for many professionals needing more time to ‘read’ online info, students with phonetic decoding issues needing to access the content, and maybe students who are blind needing to access content. Please keep copyright in mind when converting online content to audio though! See Fair Use Agreement?
On the topic of Fair Use, Copyright and Independence Day, I thought this might be a good week to discuss the Creative Commons.
Copyright and Creative Commons:
As a photographer, the copyright and sharing of digital media is something of interest to me and something I believe is very confusing to a lot people if it’s something they are aware of at all! In this digital age where most of our students will have created digital content by the time they leave our elementary schools, copyright and creative commons licensing are concepts our students need to have an understanding of. As educators, I believe we are doing our students a great dis-service if we are not repeatedly addressing these issues with them on an almost daily basis.
Some fundamentals to start with:
- As soon as your students create a digital image, an audio recording, a video clip, etc., that student legally owns the copyright to that creation.
- Even if a student is using someone else’s computer or camera (the school’s), it is the student who legally owns copyright to their creation as soon as they release the shutter on the camera, not the owner of the equipment.
- As internet users, our students not only need to know that they possess ownership of the digital content they create, but they also need to respect the ownership of others’ digital creations that they find online.
- In the current WEB 2.0 environment, almost anyone can publish their work to the world for free, from just about any computer, and within mere minutes of creating it. Publishing student work to the web can have many rewards, but also presents some risks. Students need to have an understanding of this.
I’m no lawyer, and I’ll leave it up to readers to go through the law with a fine-tooth comb, if they’d like. Copyright Law can be found here: www.copyright.gov
What I think is more immediate for me to address here in the blog is Creative Commons Licensing. Professor Lawrence Lessig, co-director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, is a name readers should remember when it comes to 21st century applicable digital rights management and protection. Professor Lessig has been working now for about five years to make copyright law more immediately applicable to today’s digital and fast-paced world of online media. He is responsible for starting his non-profit organization, Creative Commons (CC).
Broken down into it’s simplest components, CC is made up of three levels or tiers:
- Computer read information (no legal basis here). Simply a way for computers to identify content based on it’s licensing.
- Commons Deed: a simplified summary of the license. This is where you’ll find these icons (and others), which you should already be very familiar with:
- The License: this is the legal talk, likely to be most useful to lawyers.
More on CC next Friday!
BE SAFE and …
