Thing # 8

Creative Commons is a wonderful idea. Even for those of us who are supposed to know all the rules and regulations, copyright can be a very confusing and scary thing! With the technology revolution, it becomes even more complicated. I like the fact that there is a site where I can find media that I know is safe to use. When I was playing around on Creative Commons, I found that I liked searching with SpinXpress. It allowed me to search multiple formats for topics. Here is a widget where you can just type in a topic and it will pull up various media formats for that topic.

One problem I did encounter was that I have difficulty finding specific things with the CC site. I learned that I need to be creative and somewhat specific when searching. For instance, I searched for "America the Beautiful MP3" in order to get an MP3 version of the song that is approved for use.

I often use media when preparing presentations, and I encourage the students to do so also. In the future, I will certainly point the students in this direction in order to help them understand how to find acceptable media without violating the copyright laws. I would love to see a database link set up on our school pages that offered students these type of media files in a quick search method. I can easily see how time constraints in the classroom would prevent students from doing this the "proper" way, and they will continue to just use Google Images without any thought to fair use and citations. Yikes!

Overall, this is a useful tool that I will have to remember to come back to when searching for media!