Thinking about teaching your students digital citizenship can be overwhelming as it is such a broad topic.  Where do you even start?  Mike Ribble’s 9 elements of digital citizenship provides educators with a framework that organizes the themes of digital citizenship. Ribble’s 9 elements are digital etiquette, digital access, digital law, digital communication, digital literacy, digital commerce, digital rights and responsibility, digital security and digital health and wellness.

For this post, I want to focus in on the theme of digital law and how I taught this in my grade 4 classroom.  For several years, I had my students publish their work online using their blogs.  In the beginning, we did not worry about citing sources when posting images to our blogs.  Students would use Google to search for images and use those.  It was much like they did when they used images from the internet in a document or presentation when they did not publish their work online.  We soon started questioning if this was the right thing to do when we use the images online.  As a class we started investigating the answer to that very question.  Are you allowed to take images from a Google search and just use them?  This question led to more questions of my students:

-What is copyright?
-Is it different to use images online as opposed to images you use for other things?
-How do you know if you have permission to use an image?
-Where can we find images that we are allowed to use?
-How do we cite images properly?
-Does copyright apply to music we use in our work?
-Where do we find music we are allowed to use?

Over time my class and I have found some useful resources when it comes to using images and music in our work.  I hope you find them useful!

Copyright:
2Learn- copyright & teaching the basics

Images:
The Noun Project– a community building icons that anyone can understand
Pixabay– Free images
Compfight– A Flickr Search Tool
15 Best Sites for Open Source Images
Photos For Class – The quick and safe way to find and cite images for class!
Pics4Learning – Free photos for education
27 Superb Sites With Royalty Free Stock Images For Commercial Use
Google Image Search Adds Usage Rights to Search Tools
Research Tools in Google Docs– allows students to easily find and cite images in a Google Doc

Music:
Incompetech– royalty free music.  Search by genre or feel.
Soundation– online music studio with recording, effects, virtual instruments and over 700 free loops and sounds
Audio Nautix – Online collection created by Jason Shaw.
FMA– Free Music Archive.  Search by genre.
Jamendo– royalty free music downloads

Are there any resources you and your students use? Let me know in the comment section below!