Waffle Bytes

What do the following works all have in common? musical composition of Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin  The Man in the Brown Suite by Agatha Christie When We Were Very Young  by A.A. Milne The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann the first film adaption of Peter Pan* They all entered the US public domain on January 1, 2020! On that day works from 1924 entered the US public domain " where they will be free for all to use and build upon, without permission or fee ." As a historic note, these works would have entered public domain in 2000, but Congress extended copyright terms to 95 years, so we just began having yearly release of works into the public domain in 2019 again.  Why is this important?  Yearly new works are made available for a variety of uses.  From the Center for the Study of the Public Domain (maintained by Duke Law): How will people celebrate this trove of cultural material? The Internet Archive will add books, movies, music, and more t...

Next Gen Personal Finance is a great resource for teachers that are either teaching a Personal Finance course or incorporating personal finance topics into their curriculum The site includes: learning units course mapping - from an 8 hour workshop, to a full semester course resources (including "question of the day," activities and projects)  & case studies professional development and networking opportunities All materials (excluding pictures) are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Non-Commerical 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC) License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ ).  This means you can share and adapt the content following the terms of use (see note below) without seeking written permission.   "The CC BY-NC License allows you to freely share and adapt CFCI Content, provided that: (i) you give proper attribution to CFCI in the manner specified by CFCI, but not in any way that suggests that CFCI endorse you or ...

The Michigan Open Book Project is a multi-year project to provide Michigan social studies teachers with OER (Open Educational Resources) textbooks that can be downloaded, modified, and used in their classrooms.  These are FREE resources (as licensed under Creative Commons) that you can modify to best meet your needs!  From the site: "A simple math problem:  T+D+TE=MOBP T = Textbooks - your district spends thousands of dollars on them, but they were written for other states and by the time they make it to you, they're already out of date. D = Devices - your district is getting more devices every year.  Perhaps an update to the aging computer lab.  Perhaps a mobile lab of tablets to check out for your classroom.  Maybe you're going 1:1.  Whatever the scenario, more devices are making their way into Michigan schools each year. TE = Teacher Empowerment - The best teachers know their content and know ho...

I attended Lansing Community College's 2nd Annual Open Educational Resources Summit on Feb. 24th. As I was gathering resources from the summit to share in a blog, I had a bulletin from the Library of Michigan appear in my inbox with the following timely information.  These are all worth checking out! From Karren Reish of the Library of Michigan - "Lansing Community College's 2nd Annual Open Educational Resources Summit was Feb. 24th. Some of the content discussed is appropriate to the K-12 community. Thanks to Rita Kohrman from Grand Valley State University for the following information about sites discussed. ______________________________ ____ OER Commons : https://www.oercommons.org/ OER Commons is a dynamic digital library and network. Explore open education resources and join our network of educators dedicated to curriculum improvement. A “hub” found in OER Commons: STEM Literacy : https://www.oercommons.org/ hubs/stem-literacy ...

Are you an educator looking to use images that are not copyrighted?  Two big announcements from Creative Commons worth your attention: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art releases 375,000 digital works for remix and re-use online "Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announces that all public domain images in its collection will be shared under CC0, expanding their digital collection by over 375,000 images as well as providing data on over 420,000 museum objects spanning more than 5,000 years. CC0 allows anyone to use, re-use, and remix a work without restriction. From Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley, 'the largest museum in the United States has eliminated the barriers that would otherwise prohibit access to its content, and invited the world to use, remix, and share their public domain collections widely and without restriction.' ”  CC Image Search  Additionally,  CC has a new Image Search engine available in Beta - search the Met...