Why educators should use creative commons images?

I have regularly blogged about different tools to locate creative commons images, however I thought it would be useful for me to go into more information about ‘why’ we should use these – and not just from the logical response of staying on the right side of copyright law.

To start with, we need to understand what Creative Commons is. The following YouTube video explains this quite clearly. This is a New Zealand based video but the principle is the same in the UK and elsewhere.

Now onto the question of  why? I will be talking about this in an event next week, for which I have created an audio and an associated transcript (pdf) below.

Why it is important that educators use CC images (audio)

Why it is important that educators use CC images (transcript)

So – as well as the legal reason for using Creative Commons images, there is also the moral and educational reason – in that we need to prepare our current learners not just for their current studies, but also for the workplace beyond.

I was running some training at a primary school, where I introduced them to the idea of the Xpert attribution tool, and how this attaches the reference to the image, and if we get primary school children used to seeing correct referencing of images, when they get to secondary and FE/HE levels, they will be more familiar with this notion.

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How to use DSpeech to convert text to audio

DSpeech is a free piece of software which can be downloaded to a computer, or can run from a memory stick as part of the eduapps suite, and it allows a user to convert text to audio in MP3 format (so they can listen to it on computer or music player)

I like this piece of software, as it puts the learner in control of their adaptions rather than having to rely on someone else to either dictate for them, or to do the conversion, and this isn’t just useful for students with disabilities, but any learner who may not want to read a long piece of text, they can listen to it instead – and if they listen to it a few times (e.g. whilst doing something else) then they can pick up useful information that they would easily miss if just trying to read the information.