ICT as a General Capability.

The National Professional Standards for Teachers (NPSfT) 4.5 Use ICT safely, responsibly and ethically can closely be linked with the Australian Curriculum general capability Information and communication technology (ICT).  The organising elements of ICT can be identified in the diagram below.



ICT Organising Elements (Australian Curriculum- http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/GeneralCapabilities/Information-and-Communication-Technology-capability/Organising-elements/Organising-elements)

To meet NPSfT 4.5 and the general capability of ICT, students need to be engaged with the fast developing technologies that surround them. To do this students need to investigate, create, communicate, manage, operate and safely use ICT as apart of their studies at school. This will also allow students to become digital citizens of the 21st Century and to start creating their online profiles.

This blog has been made to help teachers understand how they can incorporate ICT into the curriculum safely through avoiding copyright issues. The example given will target Year 2 History.

According to the Australian Curriculum, year 2 History allows students to explore the history, significance, and change of their local area. There are two strands: Historical knowledge and understanding and Historical Skills.

Let's begin our exploration by looking at an ACARA content descriptors and see how we can incorporate the use of ICT into them.To meet the above content descriptor students will need to investigate the history of their local community. This research could be done through interviews, newspapers, information booklets or how about using the Internet? Have students explore reliable websites to gather their information. However, try and think broader then just searching on the Internet when it comes to incorporating ICT as a general capability.

Google maps (https://maps.google.com.au/) is a very useful online tool which allows students to view their local township in map and satellite form. Have students explore their town using this and then have them hypothesise the reasons to why a local landmark, such as a war memorial, might be placed where it is. If students have an old photograph of their town then have them compare it with the image presented on google maps. How much has it grown? Have things moved around? Do you think it will continue to get bigger?

Google Map Satellite view

Students could video tape an interview they have with a knowledgeable local and then upload their footage to the computer. They could then edit their work in movie maker adding titles and credits.

Why not encourage students to present their work using technology and online publishing. There are many sites which allow publication such as Wiki, YouTube, Glogster and blogs just to name a few. Publishing online can be a very rewarding and positive experience for students, as they feel proud to have their work displayed for the world to see; however, remember that there are copyright issues!

  
Publishing work online the safe way!

With a fast growing digital world it has come to the time when we need to ensure our students understand copyright and the issues surrounding it. This means we need to stop directing students straight to google where they will then be likely to copy and paste text and images without being aware of the rights that page has. A great way to get around these issues is to encourage students to search for pages with a creative commons license.

Creative commons is a non-profit organisations and provides tools and free licenses to users of the internet which allows the user to mark their work and have visitors clearly identify what can and can't be copied, reused, edited, remixed and shared.

Instead of Google, Ask Jeeves and your other common search engines, direct your students to the Creative Commons search engines. Try http://search.creativecommons.org/ This site allows students to search through multiple creative commons filtered sites like YouTube, Google Images and Flickr. It is a good way to start ensuring your students are using content that they are allowed to share and edit.

But how can we tell exactly what we are allowed to do with the content on each page? Well the creative commons has four baseline rights. Which can be seen in the below image. Users are free to mix and match these, however students cannot have the 'No Derivative' and 'Share A Like' options under the same license.

Creative Commons Basline Options: http://creativecommons.org.au/learn-more/licences



At the bottom of a page with a creative commons license you will find a banner which will have "CC" and then the chosen baselines. You can see at the bottom of this page the chosen baseline is Attribution. This means anything from this blog can be copied and redistributed so long as the Author is credited and your work links to this page. All the banner options can be viewed at http://creativecommons.org.au/learn-more/licences.

Creative commons is not only a good starting place for your students but also for all teachers. Promoting creative commons and having your work licensed will allow resources to be shared more freely limiting copyright issues. This means less stress for everyone when publishing online.

 





Cyber Safety and Digital Citizenship by Zoe Dabinett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.