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Watch this video to get an overview of what it means to be a good digital citizen. We will talk about these topics more in depth in the lessons.

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We must be good citizens even in the digital world! Watch this video to find out what “digital citizenship” means.

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What Is Digital Citizenship? | Common Sense Education

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What Is Digital Citizenship? is a video from Common Sense Education. Use this video to help your students learn and thrive in our connected world.

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This infographic highlights to ways to be a good citizen online. Click on the Infographic to learn how you can be a good citizen on the internet.

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For students today, the digital world offers enormous possibilities. Free and low-cost digital tools allow students to write blogs, share their photos and art work with a global audience, create videos and develop a YouTube following, collaborate on projects with peers and experts around the world, and

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Infographic: I'm a digital citizen! | ISTE | Educational Technology Resources

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For students today, the digital world offers enormous possibilities. Free and low-cost digital tools allow students to write blogs, share their photos and art work with a global audience, create videos and develop a YouTube following, collaborate on projects with peers and experts around the worl...

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Here are some fun games to learn more about being a good digital citizen! Play the games to become more familiar with what you should and shouldn’t do when online.

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Interland is an adventure-packed online game that puts the key lessons of digital citizenship and safety into hands-on practice. Play your way to being Internet Awesome.

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Click here to learn more about being safe online! There are videos, fun games, and activities. Watch a video or two and complete an activity of your choice.

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Read this article to learn more about Creative Commons and how to use it. You will use photos with Creative Commons licenses in your work.

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As K-12 educators, you face unique challenges when it comes to using the Web. Not only are you trying to find resources to aid your teaching, but you're also on the lookout for resources that your students can use -- legally, technically, and socially. With so much out there, it can be difficult to figure out what is and isn't suitable for classroom use -- not to mention what will interest students long enough to tear them away from what's trending on social media.

One set of tools, known as Creative Commons licenses, can help address some of these challenges, while also enriching the teaching process and empowering learners of all ages.

What are Creative Commons licenses?

Creative Commons licenses are free copyright licenses that creators can use to indicate how they'd like their work to be used. Creators can choose from a set of six licenses with varying permissions, from the most open license to the least open license.

The most open license, and the license generally recommended for open educational resources, or , is OER Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). CC BY means that anyone may distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the creator's work, even commercially, as long as they give credit. All CC licenses require attribution; on top of attribution, the creator may choose to add a combination of three other conditions, which result in the rest of the licenses you see here. For example, if creators want to prohibit commercial uses, they would add the NonCommercial condition; if they want to require that downstream users also reshare their adaptation under the same terms, they would add the ShareAlike condition; if they want the work to be redistributed unchanged, they would add the NoDerivatives condition.

More than half a billion CC-licensed works exist on the Web free for teachers and students to use, build upon, and share. Many of these works are educational resources that have been licensed by teachers, educational organizations, schools, and even the government.

You can do the same on Flickr Advanced Search. You can also browse the entire CC Flickr library by license at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. In addition to CC-licensed photos, Flickr hosts a commons of photographs with no known copyright restrictions from various cultural heritage institutions at http://www.flickr.com/commons/.

If you're looking for educational resources such as textbooks or lesson plans, check out this list of the most popular educational websites with open educational resources: https://open4us.org/find-oer/.

How do you attribute creators of CC-licensed content?

Students learn to cite sources as part of educational and academic norms from a young age. Since all Creative Commons licenses require attribution, they can be a good starting point for teaching students about when and how to give credit to authors for their works. Our Best Practices for Attribution offers examples for anyone to follow, including teachers and students, for giving attribution.

In general, we encourage teachers to use the TASL acronym when teaching students how to attribute. TASL stands for Title, Author, Source, and License. For example, this photo from CC's 10th birthday celebration was taken from Flickr.

An ideal attribution would include all four elements (TASL) and look like this:

" Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" by tvol is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Title? "Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco"
Author? " tvol" - linked to the author's profile page
Source? " Creative Commons 10th Birthday Celebration San Francisco" - linked to Flickr page where original photo exists
License? " CC BY 2.0" - name of license linked to license deed, which is https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

More examples by media type and a full explanation of what should be included can be found at https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution.

Why do CC licenses and open educational resources matter?

CC licenses are the legal tools that help you discover, share, remix, and build upon educational resources, which is what makes them open educational resources, or OER. In a sense, CC licenses are the infrastructure of roads underlying the ecosystem of OER to make reuse and sharing possible. As long as the roads are properly maintained -- that is, the CC licenses/legal tools are kept up to date -- creators have more options for how to share their works, educators have easier means of discovering and sharing OER, and students are empowered to build on what came before.

A whole culture of remix and creativity has been born on the Web, and many students are taking part whether they know it or not. Creative Commons and OER enable students to take full advantage of what's possible in a completely legal way with free and open resources and tools, not to mention that CC is a great way to kick off conversations about what sharing on the Web means -- and when and how to share appropriately.

For ideas on how to incorporate CC-related creative and remix activities into the classroom, browse through the resources at Creative Commons for K-12 Educators, a free online course that's part of the School of Open. Shared Creations: Making Use of Creative Commons (PDF) is a great handbook with classroom activities on the topics of copyright, the public domain, and Creative Commons. Other fun activities to do with your students include the Get CC Savvy challenge and Teach Someone Something with Content. Check out more exercises and courses like this at http://schoolofopen.org.

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What Is Creative Commons and Why Does It Matter? | Common Sense Education

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As K-12 educators, you face unique challenges when it comes to using the Web. Not only are you trying to find resources to aid your teaching, but you're also on the lookout for resources that your students can use -- legally, technically, and socially.

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Use Creative Commons to look for pictures that are ok to use in your work. Type a keyword into the search bar to find an image. Try “butterfly”.

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Join a global community working to strengthen the Commons

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Check out this website to learn how to source the images you find online. You will need to be able to attribute the pictures you use in your writing or presentations. Read the article to review the correct format for your attributions.

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You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution.

Here is an example of an ideal attribution of a CC-licensed image:
"Furggelen afterglow" by Lukas Schlagenhauf is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0. This is an ideal attribution because it includes the:
How you attribute authors of the CC works will depend on whether you modify the content, if you create a derivative, if there are multiple sources, etc.
If you need more help, we've outlined the best practices for attribution on the CC Wiki here.

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How to give attribution - Creative Commons

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You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here is an example of an ideal attribution of a CC-licensed image: "Furggelen afterglow" by Lukas Schlagenhauf is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0. This is an ideal attribution because it includes the: Title: "Furggelen ...

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We never want to plagerize anything! But what is plagiarism? Watch the video to find out how plagiarism copies someone else’s ideas.

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Read or listen to this article to learn more about plagiarism. This will help you be able to identify when you might be copying someone else’s work instead of making it your own.

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Chris just found some good stuff on the Web for his science report about sharks. He highlights a paragraph that explains that most sharks grow to be only 3 to 4 feet long and can't hurt people. Chris copies it and pastes it into his report. He quickly changes the font so it matches the rest of the report and continues his research.

Uh-oh. Chris just made a big mistake. Do you know what he did? He committed plagiarism (say: PLAY-juh-rih-zem). Plagiarism is when you use someone else's words or ideas and pass them off as your own. It's not allowed in school, college, or beyond, so it's a good idea to learn the proper way to use resources, such as websites, books, and magazines.

Plagiarism is a form of cheating, but it's a little complicated so a kid might do it without understanding that it's wrong. Chris should have given the author and the website credit for the information. Why? Because Chris didn't know this information before he came to the website. These aren't his thoughts or ideas.

Plagiarism Steals Ideas

The word plagiarism comes from a Latin word for kidnapping. You know that kidnapping is stealing a person. Well, plagiarism is stealing a person's ideas or writing. You wouldn't take someone's lunch money or bike, right? Well, someone's words and thoughts are personal property, too.

What should Chris have done? He should have written down the name of the website and the name of the person who wrote the article. Then he could have added it and given credit to the source.

Teachers have different rules on how you list sources. Sometimes, you provide a list at the end of a report. Other times, a teacher might want you to list the source immediately after the information you took from that source. Or you might just make it part of the sentence (for example: "According to the National Institutes of Health, breathing secondhand smoke can cause problems for kids with asthma.").

All this shouldn't make you nervous to use websites, books, and other sources. It's great that you can get information from experts on stuff you don't know much about. You just have to make sure to show where the information came from. If you do that, you're in the clear.

It's not always easy to tell what's plagiarism and what's not. Sometimes, it's accidental - you really intended to do your own work, but instead ended up with some sentences that sound just like something you've read. You might not be doing it intentionally, but if you don't identify the original source, you're risking a lot of trouble.

So even if you put the information into your own words, you still should list the source. Ask yourself, "Would I know this if I hadn't read it on that website or in that book?" If the answer is no, list the source.

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Plagiarism Is Lazy

Though plagiarism can be accidental, it's sometimes done on purpose and that's just being lazy. By copying whole paragraphs from different places, a kid doesn't have to spend the time thinking about the subject, gathering his or her own thoughts about it, and then putting it into original words. Cut, paste, and you're done.

But this is a shortcut that will probably catch up with a kid, even if he or she doesn't get caught for plagiarism. It's important for kids to be able to research a subject, think about it, and then come up with something interesting to say. This skill is important in elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and beyond. A kid who just lifts an entire report won't get the practice needed to become good at this.

Ask yourself, "Am I using this to avoid doing my own work? Is it easier just to copy this?" If the answer is yes, beware. You just might be plagiarizing.

What Happens if I Plagiarize?

Most schools are pretty strict about plagiarism. If you're caught, you can wind up suspended or worse. At the very least, you're probably going to fail the assignment. When you're older and in college, some schools will expel students who plagiarize. To be expelled means to be kicked out. And when you're kicked out of one college, it can be hard to get into another.

Also, when you apply for a job someday you want to be able to say, "I graduated from Supersmart University in 2020." You don't want to have to explain how Supersmart University kicked you out!

Avoiding Plagiarism

To be on the safe side, always make it clear where the information comes from. Your teacher will tell you how to do this. Sometimes, teachers ask kids to write a bibliography (say: bih-blee-OG-ruh-fee). That's a list of the sources you used for a project or report. To do that, you'll need to know the author, the title, and the date it was published. For instance, if you did a report on giraffes, you could give credit to an author this way:

Smith, Hazel B. "All About Giraffes." 2005.

But your most important guide on sourcing is your teacher. Different teachers will have different rules. If you're confused, ask questions to make sure you understand what your teacher expects. And if you write something really great about sharks or any other topic, maybe someday someone will be quoting you in a report!

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What Is Plagiarism? (for Kids) - Nemours KidsHealth

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Plagiarism is a form of cheating because it’s stealing another person’s ideas. But there’s a right way to use Internet sources and other references when you’re doing homework or a report. Find out more.

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This infographic gives ways to avoid plagiarizing in your work. You will need to know how to use someone else’s words properly in your writing. Read each line and think of how this is connected to reading strategies you already use.