Images, Copyright, and Mashup

This week I learned a lot of useful things. One of which was a copyright site called creative commons. It gives you the opportunity to place copyrights on your internet material such as blogs, or pictures that you upload. I think this is really good because then you can let people know what you want to be reproduced and what shouldn't be.
Images, using flickr, was very fun. This is something that I think I will use for my personal use as well as for school use. I love pictures, and having a place to store them all online will be great.
Finally using Google maps and Google earth was fun. I love the sites especially Google earth. I was able to recreate my whole cruise in the matter of minutes. I was also able to load it onto Google Earth and look at it from a different perspective. While I was looking at this I was thinking about all the great Social Studies lessons and learning tools I could come up with from this one easy site.
The best thing about all of this technology is that it is free to use which means that we will be more able to use it in the classroom. I think that the children will be able to use it as well, but the biggest challenge, in my opinion will have to do with censoring. I was just looking up random things in the search on Flickr and when I typed in "cheesecake" a naked woman came up. This worried me, because that is not appropriate for a student in school to end up looking at. A challenge in helping them look at things more critically will be to get them to see the educational value of the image and not just play around with the technology. They also may not understand that they can't just go anywhere and take pictures from any site. They will have to be careful about respecting copyrighted materials.