This week’s class was focused on Open Educational Resources (OER). Alongside OER comes copyright laws, which are extremely complex but important. I had some prior knowledge of copyright and properly sourcing images used on your website. In the CSC class I took, I found using my own photos was so much easier than applying the creative commons filter to google images. I am excited to learn more about easier ways to use photos on my website and how to properly cite them. To relate this type of situation to retrieving learning materials, it is extremely relieving to know that there are educational resources out there that are so accessible. Up until this week, I have only ever heard of teacherspayteachers.com. So, it’s nice to know that there are free resources for my future self to use.
Creative Commons Discussion
In class, we split into different breakout rooms to discuss resources relating to different topics surrounding open educational resources. My group researched the Creative Commons. We discovered that creative commons holds images that can be copyrighted and distributed within the specific copyright laws. This means that the owners of these creative resources are allowing others (like teachers) to use their work. This is really important to me as a future educator because I now know how to find legal resources (ie. worksheets, images for presentations and lessons) to use in my classroom.