This week’s lessons on Copyright laws and what to do and not do were very, very confusing. I understand the basics of the Copyright law and that it is to protect the rights of the creator from having his or her work copied. However, there are exceptions such as fair use, public domain, and the TEACH Act. I understand the reasons behind fair use, which is to allow libraries and educational institutions to use copyrighted materials for educational purposes. If there was no fair use than the educational world would be limited on the information that it could present to its students and that would limit the creativity and the understanding of the students. Then there is public domain. It is very difficult to understand what falls under Public Domain and what has not quite made it there. I am thankful for searches and charts that try to help people understand what is and isn’t public domain. I understand the use of items from public domain for creating lessons or videos because they are no longer under copyright law and are free to use. The TEACH Act is a fairly recent act and it stems from the development of distance learning, without this act I would not be working on my Masters. One of our reading this week was about if the Copyright Office should be removed from the Library of Congress and become its own entity. After some of the other readings and videos from this week I feel even more strongly that the Copyright Office should no longer be subject to the rules and regulations from the Library of Congress because many of them are no longer applicable in this digital world. The only way to keep up with the digital world and all its copyrights is to modernize the Copyright Office. Everything in the digital world changes so quickly that we need to change to keep up with it or at least try to keep up.
As an educator I also learned the importance of using copyrighted materials correctly and to teach my students the importance of giving credit where credit is due. I feel that as a teacher of young students the first lessons should be about plagiarism. I think this is something that young students will be able to connect to because they would not want someone copying their work and claiming it as their own. I will be looking for ways to include this in my lessons this year during our research projects. During our web conference this week the guest speaker talked about Document Based Questions. These are things that I will begin to look into so that I can incorporate these ideas into my classroom. I also want to share with other grade levels the importance of understanding copyright laws because we need to be examples for our students. We cannot expect our students to learn these things on their own. We need to be the ones to teach them so that they are respectable digital citizens ad can be examples for others.
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AuthorI am an educator, nature lover, sea turtle conservationist and dog mom. Archives
July 2017
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