Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Maybe the message is getting through

Today I was working with a Grade 5/6 class. They are building their Digital Portfolios in Powerpoint and while they have learnt lots of technical and practical skills the impressive thing are the ideas and thoughts that many of them are adding. But what blew me away today was a conversation I heard between three students. One was showing the others some images oon his DP of his pet lizard. The conversation went something like this. Student One: this is my pet lizard Lucky. Student Two: what is that other picture of a lizard? Is that Lucky too? Student Three: I don't think that is Lucky. I think you copied it from the internet. Student Two: What about copyright? Remember we're not allowed to just get pictures from the internet if they are copyrighted. Student One: Hmmm okay I did copy it. I'll delete it and get another real picture of Lucky from home.
All this happened without the kids knowing that I was listening. I was pretty rapt as earlier this year we did some lessons around copyright but I wasn't sure whether it sunk in. At least it did with these three!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well done! I have had some fun getting my students to generate some clipart with Inkscape then sharing these under a creative commons licence. The activity gets them thinking about free resources that they can legally use instead of relying on using copyright material.

Anne said...

that's a great idea Roland. I guess you could use that concept with anything that the students create. It's really just about the licence isn't it. I will have to investigate further