Terms, Laws and Ethics For Using Copyrighted Images

We all like to use images in our presentations and projects to make them more visually appealing. We need to make sure that we correctly reference any images belonging to someone else and that we use the images according to legal and ethical standards.  Follow these links to find out more about what you can and can't do with images: copyright, fair use, creative commons, and public domain. 

Curtis Newbold created a useful guide and infographic to help explain the do's and don'ts. 

Using PhotoStory in Afrikaans classes

Afrikaans Photostory

This project entailed using Microsoft Photostory 3 and creating your own video album with short descriptions in Afrikaans.  Students could choose a theme or a specific event which took place.  They were encouraged to use their own photos on their laptops and Facebook to make engaging and relevant.  Students had to ensure that they used the STOMPI, Afrikaans sentence structure, as their guiding light for their descriptions and sentences.  

Learning Meiosis hands-on!

Cell division in Life Sciences is best learnt by getting students to 'recreate' the stages of the process in a practical, hands-on way.

Using playdough, each stage of meiosis can be modelled, annotated and then photographed. These images can then be imported into Photostory or Movie Maker and then edited. Narration, effects and music can be added to complete the digital story and the project saved as a movie file. Editing the timing of each digital image can create an animated sequence representing the stages of this type of cell division.

This type of activity supports visual learners and can be a wonderful way in which to reinforce concepts and enhance understanding. It also means that the completed movie can be shared, uploaded to a blog and used for revision purposes in the future. Collaboration, creativity, organisation and critical thinking are all 21st Century Skills that can be effectively implemented in this excercise.

The videos below are examples of the movies that were created in this way.

Using Digital Storytelling to learn Xhosa Vocabulary

Learning Xhosa vocabulary in a linear fashion may not be the most inspiring or effective way of teaching a second language so we decided to put a different spin on the theme of Churches and Ceremonies for the Grade 10 Xhosa class.

The boys were asked to take photographs of various items in the school chapel using whatever technology they had available and to source other pictures from the internet that supported the theme.

Using these downloaded resources, and PhotoStory 3, the boys created a narrated picture story in Xhosa and saved the final product as a movie.

Photostory works by organising a series of digital images into a sequential order. One can then add various effects to each of the images, insert text, music and even record your own voice. It is a Microsoft tool and freely available for download off the web. Photostory projects can easily be uploaded into Classroom blogs without having to going through YouTube.

This made their learning experience more visual, fun, creative and contextual and also supported an active learning environment.

Here is an example of one of the movies created by the boys.