Over the years we’ve worked with many staff and students who’ve worked hard to develop digital learning resources but unfortunately haven’t been able to publish them. This is usually because they haven’t kept track of where they’ve sourced images and other digital assets from and they’re not sure if they’re copyrighted, reusable under a CC licence or open and in the public domain.

Reusing online resources is very much like referencing in a research or scholarly article you need to make sure you reference your sources and provide the appropriate attribution.  If you re-use a picture in PowerPoint, a video or an online learning resource it’s important to remember to give attribution. It’s worth checking out the Creative Commons guide on best practices for attribution for examples of how to do this well.

Given that you need to include attribution it’s helpful to think about how you manage and organise the different resources that you want to use, modify and adapt in your teaching.  There are lots of ways you can file your links and resources, some people bookmark sites in their web browser, some file in a Word doc or an Excel file, some might even still write the details on a file card and file it in A-Z file box.  There are other tools that you can use such as social bookmarking tools like Diigo.  This work as an extension on your web browser and let you save the link, add comments and tags and save to lists too.  It’s easy then to search and find links that you’ve saved going back several years.  If you’re working on a project you can create a project tag so that you can easily filter and find the resources you’ve used.  Diigo and Delicious allow you to keep your bookmarks private or public if you opt for public you can share them easily with a class or colleagues, here’s a link to my saved bookmarks on copyright.

An easy way to keep track of any images you might use is to make use of the new Creative Commons search where you can create an account and save and tag images into lists so that you have a record of the ones you want to use.  It also generates the attribution credits so that you can easily copy and paste it in where you need it.

Here are some other tools that you can use to bookmark and file online resources.  Most of these allow you can create tags for different projects so that you can then easily find the links to things relevant to what you’re working on at any particular time.

 

Take a look at some of these in your group and discuss whether you think they might be useful to you own practice.

Next activity – Publishing and curating resources