Turning Google Docs Footnotes into Endnotes

In my schoolwe don't ask the students to use footnotes.  Rather we have students do a works cited page at the end of their document.  If you are school that uses Google then you might be familiar with the autocitation feature of Google Docs.  This is really helpful for students, but the problem is that it creates footnotes, not endnotes.  In the past, I have had my students copy the footnotes and paste them at the end of their paper.  While not terrible, students often forget or don't capture the whole citation.  I recently came across a Google Doc add-in called Endnote Generator and I think it's just what my students need.  Is this something that you think you would use with your students?  Do you know of something similar?

searching for Creative Commons images

I know we all like to practice good digital citizenship and encourage our students to do the same.  One of the biggest places were people fail is taking images that don't belong to them and aren't licenced to be shared.  Creative Commons is an a way for people to give a copyright license to their work to specify what permissions the public has to share and use their work.  (This blog has a Creative Commons licence).  Creative Commons has come out with CC Search which is a a search tool that allows you and your students to search for images that have a licence that allows you to use the images it finds.

Right now CC search looks for images from 500px, Europeana, Flickr, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and Rijksmuseum.  While it's not perfect, it's nice to know that you won't be violating any copyright laws by using an image.  If you are looking for other ways to search check out my blog post about using your search engine to find images you can use.

Find images you can legally use

We all use images in our lessons whether we are putting them in our presentations or students are using them in their projects.  It is important that we are not taking images that the creator didn't give us permission to use.  It is very easy to take images from a website and to justify our use under the guise of fair use.  The fair use doctrine was create to allow copyrighted works to be used fro classroom instruction (among other things).  Many teachers believe this means that they can use anything in their classrooms and this is not true.  I'm not here to discuss the ins and outs of fair use, but if you want to learn more you can visit this site from the US Copyright Office.

While, many times I am covered under fair use when I use images for my teacher, I like to be sure that I am covered.  To do so you can filter your searches in your search engine to include ones that are licences for your to use.  While each site uses slightly different language here are some ideas as to what each term means.

• Public Domain - the creator has basically waived all copyright rights
• Free to share and use - you can use it and share (but not change it) for personal purposes only
• Free to share and use commercially - you can use it and share it for personal or commercial purposes
• Free to modify, share and use: you can use, edit and share it for personal purposes only
• Free to modify, share and use commercially - you can use, edit and share it for personally or commercial purposes 

Here are some short animated gifs that show you how to find these search filters on a few different search engines.

Google

Bing

Yahoo