Native American Heritage Month, Daily Agenda Slides

As a school librarian, I often create resources for teachers, but I don't always know if they have the desired impact, as they might be utilized when I'm not in the classroom. Case in point: the daily agenda slides I created for Hispanic Heritage month. 

This resource took a ton of time to create and was one of my big summer projects before the school year ramped up. I thought they were an accessible way to introduce diverse voices into our curriculum, and I liked the tie-in to national heritage months, but I wasn't sure if my teachers felt the same.

Then, last week, I started getting emails asking if I had daily agenda slides to share for the upcoming Native American Heritage Month -  teachers were reporting it had become part of their classroom routine, and that students would remind them if they had forgotten to introduce the "person of the day."

Happily, I had a slide deck ready to go, and now our social studies teachers have a month's worth of daily agenda slides to celebrate Native American Heritage month. 

If you'd like to use these specific slides, they're available here on TPT. 

One of the hardest parts was identifying the individuals to incorporate into the resource - there were so many options and a limited number of school days in November. I ended up selecting the following individuals:

When I'm building these resources, one of the biggest challenges is to find copyright-free images or images with an appropriate creative commons license. My go-to sources are Wikimedia Commons (it's part of Wikipedia and devoted to images and media files) and Flickr. 

When you search Wikimedia Commons, your results will be a series of images. If you click on a photo, it will display information underneath the photo, on the right side of your screen. This will tell you what kind of license the photo has. This particular image of Maria Tallchief is part of the Public Domain, so it does not have copyright restrictions. Images in the public domain are either older or taken by a U.S. government agency. 

If it's not in the public domain, you'll see a Creative Commons license underneath the photo. When you first start working with CC licenses, it might seem confusing -- there are different categories of CC licenses, and simply having a CC license doesn't mean you can use it on TPT. 

Luckily, it's pretty easy to read them - the language is very user-friendly. To read a CC license, just click on the link underneath the photo (circled in green below).

Below is an image of what you'll see when you click on the CC license link. It's always divided into two parts: 1) What you are allowed to do with the image, and then 2) the rules you have to follow when using the image as allowed. 

When I search Flickr, I have the option to select the type of images I'd like returned during a search. If I'm going to be using the images for TPT, I look for ones labeled "commercial use allowed," "no known copyright restrictions," and "U.S. Government works."