EDU 642 Week 2: Copyright Laws and Infographics

This week I reviewed the copyright, creative commons, and fair use terminology and concepts. These concepts are so tedious and hard to remember all of the terms and licenses. However, I did find the Padlet very useful with tons of good information to review and look over whenever I need to. There were a few resources that had some valuable information. One of these was a Slideshare about Creative Commons in the Classroom by Jessica Coates. This shared more information about Creative Commons, as well as the importance of Creative Commons in the classroom. I liked when they brought up the connotations for students when we introduce Creative Commons to them in the classroom. I like how it was presented as teaching students that it's not about what they can’t use, but about what they can use. When we as teachers, teach students the legal and professional way of using other people’s content, we empower our students to also create and share their own content.

I started to brainstorm some ideas for my Copyright assignment, and I think that I am going to create an information Padlet source for one of my units in social studies that I teach for fourth graders. This particular unit is about migration and groups of people who migrated within the United States. I am planning on putting together information with websites, images, and other content that I can find for each of the migration groups. One tool that I learned this week was the Advanced Search in Google with usage rights. This was helpful in that it makes it easy to find work that I can use correctly for projects or content that I create.

I looked at a few different technology tools for the upcoming projects for next week and worked with AdobeSpark for the first time. This is a really great tool to create any visual presentation or content. I started to design an infographic on migration groups in the United States. This was information that was given to me in my curriculum in a chart that was not easy to see the dates, so I thought I would take the information and turn it into an infographic that my students could easily see the years of migration groups. I did notice that there were SO many options to choose from when creating the infographic. It was so easy to get hung up in making everything look the way I want to, so I do think it is critical to put a time limit on the amount of time to create information or teaching material for students as it can be time consuming. When I was starting to create this infographic, I started to think about the principles last week from Mayer about design. I started thinking about how my fonts match up, what the flow of my infographic looks like and asking myself would this be easy for my students to read, and more importantly, is it easy for my students to understand the information that I am presenting?

While creating this infographic the principles that stuck out to me most was Gestalt’s principle of things looking off, then it will be the focus of the content, as well as Mayer’s Signaling principle to make sure to highlight the most important information. When giving credit and citing the information that I used from the curriculum, I had a hard time putting this in the infographic as this is something that distracts the reader. I was not sure on where a good spot to put it so it would not distract readers too much, but clearly it is important to add this to abide by copyright laws so it is essential to have.

I also looked at Pear Deck as a resource for creating video content and more interactive presentations for my students. I love that Pear Deck lets you put in audio files on Google Slides. I think that this feature would be beneficial for all of my online students. I also like how Pear Deck has so many template slides that can be added right into your lesson. These included slides that required students to respond to their learning and thinking, which is something that my online students don’t get very many opportunities to do, so I think that this would be so helpful to students’ learning. I would like to try this out on some of the online content that I create for ELA for my students.

Ultimately, this week I know that I grew in my knowledge of copyright, creative commons and fair use. I think that this is something that I need to just keep reviewing and will always need to come back and review, but I know that my thinking is changing when I am creating digital multimedia about where I am getting my content from and following the copyright laws and fair use policies. I also grew in my knowledge of infographics and different tools to create infographics. I know that I would like to start using more of these in my teaching, but it is hard because they can take so long to create.