In my school board, Copyright Posters (i.e., the DOs and DO NOTs of photocopying) are posted above most photocopiers in our school.  In general, they make wonderful wallpaper, which is to say that they don’t get much attention after a while.  Our manager of Business and Learning Technologies always includes copyright reminders in his monthly e-newsletters (e.g., Did you know that it is a copyright infringement to use your personal Netflix account to show videos in you classroom?), but one walk around during an indoor recess would tell you that this message has not been received (or at least implemented) by many teachers.  Despite the fact that there are lots of free-to-view videos available online on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, as educators, we still tend to show videos that impinge on copyright issues for, I believe three reasons:

1. Educators want to show the best possible material to students;
2. Educators may not realize that there is a copyright infringement;
3. Even when educators do realize that there is a copyright infringement, they never feel or see the consequences of such an infringement and so there is not a strong disincentive.

This is true of images too insofar as students and educators take images off the internet and paste them into projects and personal sites. When I first started blogging, I copied images from the internet with no regard for copyright, never even mentioning where I got the images from.  Later, on my blog, I started including links to the images’ URLs or websites that they came from.  Finally, when I learned about Creative Commons, I started doing “labelled for reuse” searches in Google images and only using those images and attributing to the creators, as necessary.

Here is a quick screencast I made on how to search for images that you are allowed to reuse.

I have done this with students before, but I have never gone through the ins and outs of Creative Commons licensing. That is definitely something that I would do with my grades 3-8 students in the future.  (Though I suspect that as with all technology-related lessons I do, there will be a student or two in the class who already knows about Creative Commons and can teach me a thing or two!  What a great time to be a teacher/learner!)