Encouraging the Use of Public Domain Assets

[traci_gardner]

Image credit: NASA

If your students are creating projects that include images, video, and audio, public domain resources can contribute to amazing work that avoids many of the headaches of using copyright-protected assets. Since public domain assets are free of copyright protections, students can freely incorporate them into their projects without asking for permission or evaluating them for fair use.

Here’s an example: If a student needs an image of Earth for a project, going to the NASA site for the photo (like the one on the right) is the best choice. Because NASA is a government agency, its work is automatically in the public domain. The student will find hundreds of high resolution, free images that can be incorporated into any project without asking for permission. All she needs to do is provide attribution and documentation for the source. Likewise, if the student is creating a video and needs a clip of the planet, she can find everything she needs on the NASA Videos site. If anything, she will have difficulty choosing among the many options.

To encourage students to take advantage of the benefits of using public domain resources, I created a one-page overview of the basic details of what I see as the three most important questions people tend to have. I used the same model I did for previous resources on why you should use documentation and what needs to be documented. As in the past, I created the page below (shown as an image) on “Using Public Domain Assets.” The page is also available as a Google Doc or a PDF to provide full accessibility to students.

This overview outlines the details that I hope will encourage students to search for public domain resources to use in their projects. Once we have reviewed this information, I would share places to find public domain resources as well as details on how to indicate credit for the creator and document their public domain sources in their projects. I’ll talk about those topics in future posts.

Do you have questions about encouraging students to use public domain materials? Do you have feedback on my one-page overview? I would love to hear from you in a comment below!

Photo credit: Taken with NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer aboard the Terra satellite.