I chose to look closely at the theme of copyright because it overlaps my work as a photography and digital media teacher with the role of the teacher librarian. While I already had a good understanding of intellectual property, the research I have done to compete this task has provided me with practical skills and the ability to apply that knowledge to a school context. Now I can share information about finding Creative Commons licenced material, how to provide an attribution and what constitutes acceptable copyright practice for students in schools.
As an avid Adobe user, I consider myself adaptable when it comes to using new technology. I soon found creating the digital guide would throw up some unexpected challenges! I wanted to keep the digital artefact simple and appropriate for my secondary school student audience. I used Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro to create my digital artifact and Copyright Clues logo. I also found the feature font from DaFont which was free to install and use without a licence. It was easiest to source free images from sites like Pexels and Pixabay, so I have added a curated list of resources to my digital guide that I can use to assist students in the future. Searching for content outside of the Pixabay Image plugin on ThinkSpace, means you can also search for illustrations, vectors, videos, music, and sound effects. It was time consuming to find audio because the tags that are used aren’t always accurate or easy for people to describe.
I thought building the digital guide would be relatively simple considering I have some experience using ThinkSpace. This is where the challenges began! I selected the Ward theme, which has a good layout for a website. Having a design background, I naturally wanted to customise the style and the appearance of all the text and images. I was surprised how challenging this was in WordPress! After much frustration and searching the WordPress support page, I have learnt about customising widgets, working with a variety of plugins, and editing cascading style sheets with Custom CSS. I have also discovered how easy it is to import open-source fonts from Google Fonts to customise standard themes and make them look unique.
References
Creative Commons. (n.d.). About CC Licenses. https://creativecommons.org/about/cclicenses/
Creative Commons Australia. (n.d.). How to attribute Creative Commons licensed materials. https://creativecommons.org.au/learn/fact-sheets/attribution/
DaFont. (n.d.). Home. https://www.dafont.com/
Google Fonts. (n.d.). Home. https://fonts.google.com/
Pexels. (n.d.). Home. https://www.pexels.com/
Pixabay. (n.d.). Home. https://pixabay.com/
Smartcopying. (n.d.). Students and copyright. The official guide to copyright issues for Australian schools and TAFE. https://smartcopying.edu.au/students-and-copyright/
WordPress.org. (n.d.). Support. https://wordpress.org/support/theme/ward/
