by Diana Gill, March 2021

If you were to ask me what I find to be the most beautiful thing in this world, my answer would be the act of vulnerability. Someone being open to learning and sharing, completely unfiltered, is beauty.

The growth mindset trend in education asks educators to embrace vulnerability in our classrooms and as leaders, as evidenced in the phrases used to encourage it: take risks and fail forward. Learning requires an amount of vulnerability, and while life-long learners understand this, it is part of our challenge. Guiding students, or adults, towards being open and vulnerable while learning can be a delicate task. To be a vulnerable learner is to admit that you don't know everything and that you need to perhaps change your mind.

But, not all vulnerability is good. Being a vulnerable learner is different from being vulnerable because you aren't protected. And maybe this other kind of vulnerability is where educators find themselves currently.

From an educational technology perspective, I can't imagine we have ever been more vulnerable as educators. We are used to the four walls of our classrooms that offer a literal and figurative barrier from the outside world. The COVID-19 pandemic has opened a window not only into our classrooms, but also into our homes. No, that is not quite right. The pandemic has bulldozed entire walls of our buildings, leaving us feeling inadequate and unsheltered. We've been here for a while now, and it doesn't feel like teaching and learning will ever quite be the same.

Maybe it is time to regroup a bit. We survived the beginning of the storm, but now we have to settle in. It's a complicated problem, one that asks us to consider the mental health of teachers and students, physical safety, serving all populations, access to resources, digital equity, and more. I don't want to be dismissive of just how complex education is right now, but I do hope to focus in and offer some things to think about.

What foundations should we be building and drawing upon for support? We can approach this vulnerability from two angles. First, we have to deliver online learning from a place of solid instructional design. Whether curated or designed from scratch, online learning is much more than a format shift: it is an entire redesign. And second, we have to consider how to do this responsibly.

Adulting, Choices, and Vulnerability

My friend Michele Eaton brilliantly ties making decisions as an adult to consumer research about making choices in general and how we can leverage similar concepts when designing online content. To very briefly paraphrase, too many options are bad and maybe too few options are just as bad. She discusses this, and all things online and blended learning, in her book The Perfect Blend, which I encourage you to look to as you design your online content.

I would like to draw a parallel here. The choices we make as adults require us to choose the long-term goal over the immediate gratification. Adults play the long game, if you will. I'm talking about all the fun stuff: 401Ks, life insurance policies, saving for college, etc. If we are being honest, adulting has become increasingly difficult while faced with a pandemic. We have to be sure we continue to guide new adults in learning the skills that will help them in future, even if they have become a challenge for the experienced adults.

But, how do we do that in the middle of a global pandemic? In an even more direct parallel that brings us back to vulnerability, let's admit that right now sometimes we are only thinking one class period ahead. We had to make a format shift in the way that we teach literally overnight. For most of us, survival mode feels very real. When the monthly professional development opportunity rolls around, it is tempting to give yourself permission to just tune it out. While adulting in life might be setting up a 401K, maybe right now adulting as a teacher is embracing that PD, or more specifically to my point, entering a discussion about topics such as online safety, data privacy, digital citizenship, and copyright.

Teaching right now is just hard; there is no sugar coating it. So, why should you care about demonstrating responsibility in our teaching when it can be difficult to think about just getting through the day? The answer is simple: we can't teach things that we don't feel comfortable in, and whatever type of vulnerability our students are facing, it is our responsibility to give them the tools to embrace the good kind of vulnerability and combat the bad.

All educators are creators, and we got a crash course in curating and creating online content this past year. I first turned to creating my own digital instructional materials earlier in my career as a way to escape from the canned curriculum when I recognized how it was not reaching my students. At first, it was simply about creating something more personal and engaging.

Responsibility, Intellectual Property, and Designing Instruction

I am not a copyright lawyer, nor did I always have copyright on my radar. As I got better at designing my own content and curating content, I started to realize that having an understanding of copyright helps me in a number of ways. First, it helps me by making me a better designer. As I share and search and get better at vetting content, I am accessing higher quality content and more successful online instructional strategies, which helps me when I design from scratch.

We absolutely have a responsibility to help our students grow in areas of information literacy, digital literacy, copyright, and all things related, but we can't help our students build these skills if we don't feel confident in them ourselves. Learning these skills as part of what we do as educators in designing instructional activities is the perfect way to approach it pragmatically.

I won't be using a fear-based approach here. You can use Google to find many recent examples of schools and educators being called out for copyright infringement. Instead, it is important to care about copyright as part of considering ourselves designers of high quality content; not getting in trouble is certainly a fringe benefit of that.

In many ways, we are making ourselves more vulnerable by designing our classrooms for an online space, but that doesn't have to be a bad thing. In fact, it can be powerful if we leverage it correctly. The process of considering fair use and copyright isn't only about protecting yourself. It can become a regular part of your planning process and can assist you in designing experiences intentionally. It's about being a responsible educator.

Key Topics

As you think about how to design and deliver your online content responsibly, you can consider the following ideas to apply to your work as an instructor. The ultimate goal is to design your learning experiences with these things in mind and pass the same knowledge of these topics on to your students.

1. Fair Use

There is a huge myth I would like to start by dispelling. It is one that we have all likely heard or even repeated, and I think it comes from good intentions to try and make the waters of copyright easier to navigate.

The myth is that I can use anything in my classroom and call it educational use. This is simply untrue and is an over application of what I imagine is an attempt to understand fair use. There is an exception to copyright law that does allow us to use copyrighted materials in our classrooms without permission, but only if we follow certain guidelines. Visit https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html for more information.

2. Open Ed Resources

We can make a simple shift in where we go to find resources for our classrooms. When curating online resources, we should be looking for those that are licensed for reuse and modification, so that we can remix and personalize them. Open educational resources (OERs) are teaching materials found in the public domain or that have been licensed for open use. These resources are released under a license that allows you to use them, share them, and modify them to fit the needs of your students. The Go Open movement started during the Barack Obama administration to bring awareness to the power openly licensed materials have to transform teaching and learning. To read more about the Go Open initiative visit https://tech.ed.gov/.

We have to be careful that we don't assume that something is openly licensed just because it is freely available online, which is another myth! Repeat after me: Pinterest is not an open education platform. Teachers Pay Teachers is not an open education platform.

3. CIPA and COPPA

Technology can be frustrating. No matter how sound your technology infrastructure and knowledge is, the one thing you can expect is that sometimes, technology won't work the way you expect it to. I'm just laying the baseline for how and why teachers can become disenchanted with the technology department of their schools, and that is before we even start talking about Internet filtering. While technology leaders and teachers will likely never agree on the perfect way to filter the Internet, it is helpful to know why it has to be filtered in the first place. Educators should be familiar with the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

If you are a classroom teacher, it is your role to be responsible about the tools and websites you are asking your students to use while they learn. In educational technology, the age of thirteen is a big deal. This is the age at which many tools that were previously off limits become "safe" for students to use. Quite literally, turning thirteen is a digital coming of age. In reality, we know that students have access to and are using apps that they are technically too young for on a daily basis. However, educators have a legal and ethical responsibility to model good digital citizenship. Digital citizenship is not simply about making items off limits for students based on age, the possibility of distraction, or exposure to content. Instead, it is supporting students in the building of skills so when they are faced with a decision of what to access, they can navigate the choice guided by self-regulation.

4. Terms of Use

Terms of use trump copyright law. Educators can add a simple step when vetting a tool or website to use by searching the terms of use (use Control + F in most browsers) for "13" or "18" to see how old a student should be in order to use the tool. Oftentimes, there is an educational version of the tool that the students can use, but the consumer version should be off limits. If you aren't sure, find someone in your building or district that can help advise you. Terms of use can also impact other tools you might have considered using in your classroom. It is likely that Netflix is filtered at your school because it would be a violation to their terms of use to stream in a public setting such as schools. Your media specialist or your technology department are the best resources if you aren't sure!

5. Creative Commons

Creative Commons is another great resource that can help you do two things. First, it has easy to read and use licenses that creators apply to their content, and these licenses can help clarify what you can use and how you can use it in your classroom. Second, if you create content, you can apply these licenses to your own work so that you can share it knowing that your original work is being shared, used, and changed in the way you want it to be. Read more at https://creativecommons.org.

6. Images

One easy change you can make in your efforts to teach digital responsibility is by starting with images. This is one tangible change you can make that is also easy to approach with students when talking about citation and copyright. First, change where you go to find the images you are using for your online content. Ask your students to stop doing simple Google Image searches, too. Using better platforms helps us be sure we are allowed to use the image in the first place. (Another myth alert: just because the image is available online and I link back to the source does not mean I have permission to use the image!) The second thing you can do is to attribute the image properly. The Creative Commons licenses make your life really easy when it comes to using images, and Creative Commons is a great resource for learning how to properly attribute images. I recommend searching within GSuite tools, such as Docs or Slides, to find the images you use, or use a website such as Pixabay, which has its own license that does not require attribution at all.

7. Movies and Music

Educators often ask the question: Can I show a movie in my class? The Face-to-Face Teaching Exemption, in summary, allows educators to show films in their classroom as part of face-to-face instruction. Right now, what you really want to know likely is if you can show film to your class when teaching online. Digitizing DVDs as a way to distribute a film to an online class is not permissible. That may seem obvious to you, but I've certainly seen educators do this exact thing in response to our sudden shift of online learning. Remember to consider fair use and the terms of service. You might need a streaming license, and this is definitely something to speak to your media specialist about. The idea that using two minutes of a film or thirty seconds of a song and remaining "safe" is just a myth.

You can leverage this consideration for movies and music when you create instructional videos or ask your students to create as part of their learning. WeVideo is my favorite tool for creating because a subscription includes millions of openly licensed film clips, songs, and images that students can use to create without fear of infringement. There are also other websites with openly licensed music and sound effects. My go-to website for these resources is https://www.bensound.com.

8. Remixing

Remixing is the art of creating new instructional resources specific to your teacher voice and the needs of your students. It allows you to combine the best of both worlds to create high-quality materials repackaged and delivered in your own voice.

Educators have been remixing forever. We find items online, change them, and rearrange them to make them work for us. David Wiley defined remixing as "the right to combine the original or revised content with other material to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)."

While this concept certainly isn't foreign to you, we have to consider more than simply finding something online and changing it before putting into the hands (digital as they may be) of our students. I will argue that remixing is the sweet spot between the role of the creator and curator. You can read about the Rs of remixing OERs—retain, revse, remix, reuse, redistribute—at http://opencontent.org/definition/.

9. Attribution

Once you know that you can use something, educators and students alike should be sure to give proper credit, too. This is another tangible way to act as a model for students and staff. If you use something, cite it. Just get into the habit.

An example of proper digital attribution looks like:

This is something that you should ask your students to do each time they use an image or a resource, and you can start by modeling it for them in the work that you use in your classroom.

10. Ask, Cite, and Share

Finally, we have to shift our culture to prioritize responsible teaching and learning.

The phrase "beg, borrow, and steal" is one we have either heard or said in our field. The words that we choose to use to discuss our craft matter. They shape our culture. My call to action to you is to change the "beg, borrow, steal" culture to one that is open to sharing everything, supports responsible creativity, and gives space for reflection to grow.

Ask to use the things that you want to use, share your creations openly, and cite what you use to match what education really looks like today. It is a landscape of really passionate professionals who value themselves as creators.

Conclusion

It's a lot to think about. The perfect quote to draw upon here is from Maya Angelou:

"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better."

As adults, we have to think about the future. Sometimes that means making the hard decision right now. It is our responsibility to continue to learn, unlearn, and relearn everything we think we know as educators. It is our responsibility to allow ourselves to grow and be uncomfortable in that so that we can know better every day to do better every day for our students.

Give yourself grace to just keep things floating when that feels like all you can do. And in the moments you find to reflect, give yourself permission to be honest about where you are and what you can do better.