Copyright
In the Code of Best Practices I looked at principle number two. This principle is, "Employing copyrighted material in preparing curriculum materials.
Teachers are including clips from various websites, videos, and photographs to make their lessons more inviting for students. The fair use law allows teachers to include this type of material into their lesson as long it is linked to the curriculum that is being taught. The educator is responsible for showing only material that is necessary to teach the standard. For example, if the teacher is showing a video that deals with money and there is only 2 minutes of the video is relevant, then the teacher should stop the video at that time.
Teachers should clearly state in their lesson plans, the video they will be watching and what standard it is tied too. In our school a video request form must be completed with the aligned standard and student objective listed. After the form is filled out and turned into the media specialist then the administration must approve the video. It is a good idea to have your request in a week early if possible.
This pamphlet on the Code of Best Practices and the video are great tools for me as a future media specialist. I'm sure we have all heard of horror stories on copyright infringement and how Disney will find you if you use any of their copyrighted images, etc. This code helps us find that balance and helps us build appropriate lessons that hopefully encourage independent thinking from our students. Teachers should have this information available to them and we as media specialists need to educate ourselves on the code in order to answer any questions teachers may have on copyright.
ReplyDeleteDuring our last faculty meeting, our media specialist provided training on copyright law. Boy, did everyone want to shot the messenger. Teachers were angry and frankly rather rude when asking her questions. She explained that she wasn’t the copyright police, but it was her job to deliver the information. Many teachers were fired up. They seemed to believe the training was meant to tell them everything they were doing in their classroom was wrong. I heard one teacher call the media specialist a name because she thought her delivery was snotty. (She used a different word, but I’m keeping it clean!) I tried to defend the media specialist and explain she had to give the training, but it didn’t seem to help. Then, within two days of the training, full length current songs were being played in the cafeteria as a reward. Can the media specialist really be taken seriously when it appears even our administrators aren’t following copyright law? This is one of the facets of being a media specialist I don’t look forward to.
ReplyDeleteI worked in a school where the videos had to have prior approval. However, this mandate did not have any connection to copyright infringement laws. Rather, it was to prevent teachers from showing movies when they should actually be instructing students. I think Teacher Tube is a good source for educational videos. What about using videos to train teachers on how to teach? No one ever mentions copyright infringement in this area.
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