Images, Copyright, and Creative Commons

I’m up to Step 6 of the edublogs free self-paced course to help set up an educator blog. I think this is the step that I am going to struggle with as we have all become used to retweeting, sharing on facebook etc. Most times we don’t give it a second thought when we use images etc in worksheets that we create for students. So I am going to put some reminders for myself here to come back to and check regularly that I am doing the right thing. Am I allowed to copy and paste information from the course on my blog??? I guess I will find out …..

I liked the picture on the edublog course, but at this stage I not sure if I can use it. So I created my own from a picture I took of flowers that a student gave me. I have to work out a better way to put text on an image than in the picture editor. NOTE TO SELF: put on to-do-list.

The safest way to source images for your blog is to either:

  • Use Creative Commons images.
  • Use free (Creative Commons Zero) or public domain images.
  • Use your own photos or use images you’ve created.

Including the source of the image is not enough.

Creative Commons licenses: books, websites, blogs, photographs, films, videos, songs, and other audio and visual recordings. If any of these things don’t include a CC license, or isn’t public domain work or doesn’t indicate that the content is free to use, then don’t use it.

Unless a blogger includes a Creative Commons license, all content on that blog is automatically the copyright of the blogger.

Sources of CC images –

Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/

  • Compfight – easy way to find Flickr Creative Commons images: http://compfight.com/
  • A direct Creative Commons site in Flickr – Explore / Creative commons website: https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
  • Multicolr Search Lab: http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr/ (This looks like fun! I looked up purple and pink and found some science related photos, mainly microscope slides)

Free and Public Domain Images

All the images on Pixabay and Unsplash are Creative Commons Zero. They do not require any attribution and can be modified.

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