Last night I made time to attend the weekly oz/nz educators flash meeting. This is a fantastic meeting where educators meet to discuss elearning issues, innovations and developments. Last nights meeting was hosted by Chris Betcher of http://betch.edublogs.org/ and centered around the discussion of copyright and interactive whiteboards. In my new role I will be posting more about IWB’s so I thought I would focus this post on copyright. If you are wanting to revisit the meeting from last night you can view the replay here .
In regards to copyright the discussion centered around the lack of information regarding what students can use and cannot use in their work. Jo McLeay cited a video on youtube which looks at copyright with Disney .
Educators spoke about how they were increasingly encouraging students to make use of creative commons work through sites such as flickr. The discussion went on to remind educators of the importance of attributing work from creative commons and cited John Connell’s blog in the UK as an example of the consequences of not attributing CC work. I spoke about how at Caroline Springs we try to get students to create as much content as possible through the use of camera, illustrator and garageband and then for students to CC their work and push their work up for the global society instead of always pulling information down.
So where to from here???? This topic made me think and I went back to school to search for policies in regards to attribution of Creative Commons work and I couldn’t find any. Once again I found that disparity with my own practice with my student mentors and the greater practice of the school. I then started to look for definitive information that we could implement in regards to the appropriate way of attributing creative commons work. Well let me tell you it was quite a search but alas I found answers.
I came across http://www.smartcopying.edu.au/ which is currently under development by the Copyright Advisory Group (CAG), a committee of the Schools Resourcing Taskforce (SRT) of the Australian Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). The completed site, scheduled to be available in late 2008, will provide a comprehensive guide to copyright issues affecting Australian Schools. On this site there is a wealth of information for schools looking to guide them in regards to copyright issues. Of particular interest to me was the information sheet which looked at resources for schools in regards to creative commons licensing. This sheet became my mini bible for the day as it gave specific examples on how to attribute work licensed under creative commons and gave a great list of websites where such work can be found and used by students.
I am interested in hearing from others on what policies they have in their schools in regards to copyright and attribution. I have only touched the side of the iceberg in this post as I need to further think about the issue myself and would love further food for thought. If you are new to creative commons I have posted a video below which explains creative commons in their own words.
What a week this has been. After some long deliberation I have decided to have a break from teaching for awhile and gain some skills in the private sector. I have secured employment working as an Interactive Whiteboard Specialist. This should be very exciting and although I am extremely sad to be saying goodbye to my school and teaching it is also exciting to have this opportunity. In addition to this news I was lucky enough to take part in a DEECD Professional Learning Day at Coburg Senior High School this week. It was a collaboration day with Marco Torres. I have been lucky enough to spend time learning with Marco before and have to say it was just as inspiring this time round. I took a large amount of notes and have condensed them into a pdf document for you to have a look at. Sorry if it is a little jumbled but it makes sense to me so if you have any questions please ask me.
I thought the most powerful part of the day besides the chance to network and collaborate with others was the notion that technology in the majority of schools is a pull down experience where it is used to pull down information and pull down support when really it needs to become a push up experience where students are actively contributing to the web. We are lucky because in the age of web 2.0 this is a whole lot easier.
At the moment I have been working with teachers coaching predominantly around Interactive Whiteboards. Working with these teachers and students I have further seen the potential of these tools to enact positive elearning changes within a school.
To set the scene the teachers I am working with have never been that tech savvy and tended not to use the technology in the area for a multitude of reasons (access, wireless, upkeep etc). These are teachers that have an IWB in their room because they wanted to have a go and saw the potential to take that leap of faith into ICT. Since the start of the year I am observing that these teachers through trial and error are having a go and changing their practice so that technology is embedded. They are also actively engaging me in coaching to support their risk taking. This is resulting in a more dynamic open learning space where new teachers are seeing more experienced teachers having a go and succeeding but also learning from their challenging lessons.
I have read a lot of posts about how IWB’s are not changing pedagogy and that it is not embedding good elearning. After a lot of contemplation and research I have to disagree. IWBs are taking our teachers out of their comfort zones and are driving these teachers to take risks in their teaching. Teachers are beginning to delve into the web for resources and having conversations about elearning which have never occurred before.
So what does this mean for the students in the classroom?
I believe it will result in a more challenging environment where risk taking is supported and technology will start to make its way into the curriculum. For my coaching with staff it provides a method of delivering and modelling all of the wonderful opportunities with elearning that our College and the world has to offer.
An interactive whiteboard by itself will not be a magic pill to a schools elearning integration issues. I think we know this ! and I have never claimed that it would be. If the introduction of computers in school did not provide a magic bullet then IWB’s were not going to either.
However they are a wonderful ‘trojan horse’ for ICT integration in classrooms and I am loving seeing teachers begin to look at different ways to alter their lessons with technology in mind. The other benefit I am seeing is that software that has been purchased across our college is suddenly being utilised for a larger number of learning opportunities thus providing our school with an argument for further ICT spending as leadership will be able to see it being used and celebrated with teachers having a go.
I think right now in Victoria we should be encouraging and celebrating this ’sandpit’ time with IWB’s as it is exciting teachers to use technology. Once the sandpit time is over, like any innovation we would work through the change cycle to further integrate the technology. I think we need to remember that change takes time and involves several stages and right now we need to celebrate the beginning.
