A few weeks ago I set up blogs for two of my most enthusiastic student bloggers, Rhiannon and Bianca. I chose these students as they regularly left comments on our 2KM class blog and were committed to learning as much as they can about blogging.
After gaining their parents’ permission, I set their blogs up, adding myself as an administrator. I had a discussion with Rhiannon and Bianca about what they’re going to blog about and how often they’ll post. We then revised the features of quality posts as well as revising the cyber safety and netiquette guidelines they were already familiar with.
After some initial familiarisation sessions my students were off and it didn’t take them long to learn the basics of blogging.
Before long, my students were keen to use images off the internet to enhance their posts.
This was a dilemma for me. While my students are only in Grade Two and I don’t want to make blogging too complex for them, I knew that I would have to delve into the topic of copyright and Creative Commons to help my students develop good blogging habits.
Little do many people know, you can’t just use any images off the internet in your blog posts. Not only is this ethically incorrect but you could leave yourself open to copyright infringement.
Wanting to make this process clear to my students, I typed up a document explaining copyright, copyright infringement and Creative Commons while also offering step-by-step instructions on how to use FlickrCC to upload and attribute images in blog posts. Obviously, there is more than one way to do this but given the age of my students, I wanted to keep things as straightforward as posssible.
Below I have embedded this document. Feel free to use it with your students to teach them about these important blogging habits (note: the instructions for uploading the image to a blog post apply to Edublogs blogs).
Note – guide updated to include Wikimedia Commons instructions 20th August 2012
Using Creative Commons Images From FlickrCC and Wikimedia Commons in Blog Posts
One of the things I love about teaching seven and eight year olds is that I can teach them about issues such as copyright, cyber safety, netiquette, social networking etc just before they reach the age where they would dive into these areas, prepared or not. I feel like I can make an impact in setting my students on the right path for their futures.
I am constantly amazed at how my students respond when I challenge them and engage them with ICT and their results across the board never fail to impress me. Set your standards high, provide the structure and the support that your students need to scaffold their learning and reap the rewards!