GAME Plan Progress

One of the best resources I have found to help me become a better model of digital citizenship and responsibility is a book about the public domain and copyright law from our school library. The book had many tips and links to websites that could help me find resources and media to help my video and film classes abide by the law when making their videos. While I usually let my students use whatever music and photos they can bring in I should be directing them to some of the sites that contain public domain works or creative commons works.

Public domain works are not covered by copyright law for one of many reasons, and my students can use them in their videos without any restrictions. There are many songs, videos, and photos that fall into this category, it is just a matter of finding the material and verifying that it falls under the public domain. There are sites with photographs that fall under the public domain, like PDPhoto and Uncle Sam’s Photos that I can show to my students next school year.

I have also found some sites with works that fall under the Creative Commons that can be used for free as long as the original author is credited. I found out that Blip.tv has a search that will find video that falls under this license and Google allows filtering of image searches for creative commons media. I also have used a site for music called Imcompetech and I found another one named Jamendo that has songs that can be used in our videos.

I have learned a lot about copyright law, but I need to find some other good sources for free content that my students can use. I especially want to find some good video and music that we can use for projects, but I expect I will have to pay for a library of material to get really high quality works.