Five Resources for Teaching and Learning About Copyright

In this week's Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week newsletter I shared a short guide to finding and using media for use in classroom projects like videos, slideshows, and podcasts. This morning I've already had a few requests for more information and more resources to help students understand copyright, Creative Commons, and fair use. In no particular order, here are some of my go-to resources for helping students and teachers understand the importance and the key concepts of copyright as it relates to school projects.

Stanford University Libraries
Stanford University Libraries offers the most comprehensive collection of resources about copyright and fair use that I know of. You could spend hours looking through all of the resources offered on the site. A few pages that teachers will find particularly useful are Charts and Tools, Academic and Educational Permissions, and Copyright FAQs.

Library of Congress - Copyright and Primary Sources
This page published by the Library of Congress addresses frequently asked questions related to the use of primary sources found the LOC's sites and other places around the web. Classroom examples are included in the explanations found on the page.

Copyright & Creativity for Ethical Digital Citizens
Copyright & Creativity for Ethical Digital Citizens, hosted by the Internet Education Foundation, offers lesson plans and videos for teaching copyright in elementary school, middle school, and high school settings. Slides, lesson plans (as PDFs), and videos are available to use for free in your classroom. A sample video from the elementary school series of lessons is embedded below.



Copyright and Creative Commons Explained by Common Craft
This short video explains the big concepts of copyright and Creative Commons through the story of a photographer publishing a picture and a magazine editor who wants to use that picture for an article.


Copyright, Exceptions, and Fair Use: Crash Course Intellectual Property #3
This video is a the third installment in Crash Course's series on intellectual property. In typical Crash Course style, the video is a fast-paced overview of exceptions to Copyright and examples of Fair Use in action. The video is appropriate for high school students. Students younger than high school age may not understand a lot of the nuances used in the video.

Four Free Webinars to Check Out This Week

As we head into summer many of us start to reflect on the last school year (it was one we'll never forget) and what we want to incorporate into the next school year. If you're looking for some new ideas to incorporate into your practice, consider attending one of the following free webinars this week.

Intro to Teaching History With Technology
This is a free webinar that I'm hosting tomorrow at 3pm ET. It introduces the big concepts that I use in my online course of the same name. Register here.

Creating Simple Animated Videos
This free webinar is being hosted by my friend Lee LeFever. Lee and his wife, Sachi, create the fantastic Common Craft explainer videos. The webinar is Wednesday at 2pm ET/ 11am PT. Register here.

Activities Across Grade Levels - Engaging Science Lessons
This webinar is hosted by Rushton Hurley and Susan Stewart. This webinar is on Thursday at 5pm ET/ 2pm PT will feature tools and strategies for making online science lessons more effective and engaging. Register here and find all previous installments in the series here.

Two Ed Tech Guys Take Questions and Share Cool Stuff
This is a weekly webinar that I co-host with Rushton Hurley. Like the title says, we take questions about all things ed tech and share some cool things that we've found. Register here to join us this Friday at 1pm ET/ 10am PT. Find all previous installments in the series here.

Disclosure: I have a long-standing, in-kind relationship with Common Craft. 

Updated - How to Use EDpuzzle to Create Video Lessons

In my previous post I wrote about and included a video about adding timestamps to longer videos that you post on your YouTube channel. Rather than just talk about it, I took my own advice and added timestamps to one of my longest and most popular videos of the last few months. That video is a complete overview of how to use EDpuzzle to create video lessons without having to create your own videos. I've included timestamps in the description of the video so that you can jump directly to different sections of it.

Included in this video:
- How to create an account 0:12
- How to create a classroom via Google Classroom. 0:43
- How to make lessons with videos you've found online. 1:56
- How to make lessons with videos you've created. 4:44
- How to post the lesson for your students. 9:34
- How students can access and respond to your lessons. 11:00
- How to view student responses. 13:06
- How to create an EDpuzzle class without Google Classroom. 13:50
- How to upload your own video to EDpuzzle. 15:37

How to Timestamp Your YouTube Videos

When you're publishing videos that are longer than five or six minutes on your YouTube channel it can be helpful to viewers to add some timestamps to the video's description. Including timestamps in the description lets your viewers click to jump to an exact mark in the video. There are a couple of ways that you can do this and they're both easy to do. In the following video I demonstrate how add timestamps to the videos that you post on YouTube.


Applications for Education
I generally don't recommend making instructional videos for kids longer than about ten minutes at the most. But if you do or if you've recorded something like a livestream of a review session, adding timestamps can be beneficial to students. For example, let's say that you hosted a YouTube Live session in which you reviewed the American Revolution and answered questions from students. When you go to post the recording of that session, add some timestamps so that students can then jump to sections that address their questions.

How to Search for Matching & Similar Documents Submitted in Google Classroom

Earlier this week a reader asked me if there was a way to quickly scan across all of the documents his students submit in Google Classroom to check for elements of copying between students. Fortunately, there is a way to do this but you the function is found in Google Drive instead of in Google Classroom. To do this you simply have to conduct a search in your Google Drive. In the following video I demonstrate how this works.


Applications for Education
Google Classroom has an originality reports function that you can use to check your students' submitted writing for elements of plagiarism. However, it does have some limitations. First, unless you have G Suite Enterprise for Education (the paid version of G Suite for Edu) you can only use originality reports on three assignments. The other limitation is that originality reports only checks against publicly available documents and websites.