Learning and Leading - December 2012/January 2013

Question: Jamie is working on a “You Look Like a Celebrity” page or the soon-to-be-published school yearbook. His job is to find pictures of celebrities resembling students in the school. He has found several images online that will be perfect and gets to work editing the yearbook page. Is this OK?

Answer: Yes, it is perfectly fine if the pictures Jamie found were from an amateur photographer who takes a lot of pictures in Hollywood and posts them to a site like Flickr. The photographer sets all of her image preferences to a Creative Commons license—meaning that anyone can use them, even commercially.

Or: No, it is not legal if Jamie does a
Google search and finds some great
images. He saves them to his desktop
and starts putting them in the year-
book layout. Not only did Jamie not
cite where he got the images, but more
than likely the artists of the photos
did not release them for public or
commercial use. Jamie could request
permission from the original artist,
but most of the time that is really hard
to find. Jamie should either cite the
sources if they are released to be re-
produced or do some Creative Com-
mons searches for different images.

The second type of assessments are called prove-its, where the learner receives an overall score but does not know which questions were incorrect. Students can take (or retake) a prove-it any time they feel they are ready and as many times as needed. The system will notify an educator by email when a student passes a prove-it (with an 80% or higher score). Teachers, schools, and districts can access sum-maries that show which students have completed licenses as well as receive more detailed reports that break down assessments by item and attempts.

Since the launch in September 2011,
14,000 students from six U.S. states,
Australia, and Hong Kong have used
the DDL. While the initial focus is on
digital citizenship exposure, we hope
that the current excitement about
flipped classrooms will lead educa-
tors to develop other types of cases.
We think it would be exciting to see
schools collaborating to build a case
on, for example, employing ethos in
writing or distinguishing between pri-
mary and secondary sources.

Tip

Got a Message to Pin Up? Create Your Own Cartoon Problem: You want to create interesting bulletin boards that capture students’ attention but also get an instructional message across. Purchased materials don’t always completely align with the unit(s) that you are currently working on and can get costly.

Carmela Curatola Knowles is an elementary technology teacher for the Hatboro- Horsham School District in Pennsylvania, USA; an instructional technology specialist; and a Pennysylvania