Copyrights and Fair Use in the Classroom

K12 Online Conference 2009 Reflections
Presentation 1: GETTING STARTED KEYNOTE: The Wizard of Apps By Joyce Valenza
Presentation 2: Steal This Preso! Copyrights, Fair Use, and Pirates in the Classroom by Mathew Needleman

Joyce Valenza in her very interesting and informative presentation, The Wizard of Apps, addressed several topics. She began by discussing different aspects of digital citizenship, including the need to be aware of your digital footprint, online safety, privacy, and proper use of intellectual property. Ms. Valenza then presented different online applications that students could use in doing research, creating, innovating, collaborating, and communicating. A group of her students did a parody of the Wizard of Oz to introduce each section.

I was particularly interested in the part of her presentation dealing with intellectual property. In the digital world it is so easy to "borrow" pictures, music, videos, and other forms of literary and artistic works. In the past, most work done by students was contained within the four walls of the classroom and such "borrowing" was often covered by the Fair Use Doctrine that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders. Now, however, with more and more of students' work being published online, it is important to take a deeper look at the use of materials created by others and teach our students what is and is not appropriate to do.

Mathew Needleman in his presentation Steal This Preso! Copyrights, Fair Use, and Pirates in the Classroom also addressed the issues regarding the use of intellectual property. The issues were made personal to Needleman, a 2nd grade teacher, when PowerPoint presentations that he had created were taken by people and posted to their own websites. Since he was receiving advertising revenue based on the amount of traffic on his site, he lost income because of this. In his presentation, Needleman discusses the fair use doctrine and some of the misconceptions people have when it comes to creating multimedia projects and posting them online. He concludes by saying that to disregard copyright is setting a bad example for our students and proper use of intellectual property is a valuable lesson for students to learn. Needleman's blog contains a wealth of information about these and other issues.

One of the resources that is mentioned in both presentations is the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. This guide identifies five principles about acceptable practices for the fair use of copyrighted materials in the classroom. The guide says that confusion and fear have often limited the extent to which educators have used materials under the fair use doctrine. The guide was written by and for educators with the help of legal advisors in the hope that educators would learn what rights they do have to use existing materials.

There are materials that are already free to use without considering copyright. All federal government works are in the public domain, as are many older works. The Copyright Information Center of Cornell University maintains a guide regarding materials in the public domain. Another source of information regarding free use is the document "Yes, You Can!" on the Center for Social Media's website.

Creative Commons is another way that people can license their work. Creators of material can license their work with different degrees of protection and therefore give others the freedom to use their work in various ways provided they credit the creator. The Creative Commons website provides tools and tutorials that users can use to learn whether their materials can be licensed and how to license and publish them online. The Australian Ministerial Council on Education has published a Creative Commons information pack online, for teachers and students to learn about Creative Commons licensing and the philosophy behind it. The Springfield Township Virtual Library maintains a wiki of copyright-friendly resources on the web.

There are many resources online to help students learn how to properly cite the sources that they use and credit the creators of intellectual property. Bibme, Son of Citation Machine, EasyBib, and OSLIS all offer free online citation makers. The Springfield Township Virtual Library and the NewToolsWorkshop wiki contain a wealth of material and resources to help students become ethical citizens in the digital world.

I thought both of these presentations were very informative. They provided a number of answers to questions that I have had and also pointed me to numerous resources that will be very beneficial as I consider the use of different online materials in my classroom.

Free Websites and a Moogpal Too!

K12 Online Conference 2009 Reflections
Presentation 1: Options for Building Your Teacher Website
Presentation 2: Moogpal in Action

The first presentation I viewed, Options for Building Your Teacher Website, was given by Cyndi Danner‑Kuhn. The presenter states that "Every educator needs to build and maintain his or her own teacher Website." She feels that websites will make teachers more efficient and save them time. Teachers' websites are also a great way to make resources available to students. She recognizes that it is necessary to make it easy for teachers to build, cheap (free), easy to maintain, and user-friendly for themselves and their students. She then describes a number of sites that provide tools and host websites for free. (See table below) She discusses the benefits of each.

Websites that provide free website creation and hosting

education.weebly.com

www.wix.com

www.yola.com

www.webs.com

sites.google.com

kompozer.net

Danner‑Kuhn certainly maintains a very impressive website of her own. She has links to her del.icio.us, diigo, Twitter, and Plurk accounts. She has videos, RSS feeds, links to her own blog, links to blogs she reads, a calendar, a link to an entire course she teaches, a link to students' websites,and much more. All of this available 24/7 for her students, parents, and other educators.

I have maintained a class website for several years although I have not utilized it to the extent that Ms. Danner‑Kuhn suggests. I have used it primarily to provide hyperlinks to my students for various projects. I have found that although I spend a lot of time creating the pages, it is a great resource and time-saver for students. Our school has recently started using Moodle hosted by GlobalClassroom. I have spent a lot of time working on my Moodle classroom which offers many additional built-in capabilities. It is difficult to decide where I should devote my energies. Currently I have a blog site, a wiki site, a Moodle site, and two websites. Somehow I need to decide how to best utilize my time for the benefit of both my students and myself.

The second presentation I viewed, Moogpal in Action, was given by Chris Walsh. This presentation provided a preview of the development work being done by the New Tech Network of high schools to integrate three programs Moodle, Google Apps, and Drupal. These are three free and open source tools that the New Tech Network plans to use in their nationwide network of high schools. New Tech is currently made up of 41 schools in nine states.

The New Tech Network needed a tool to personalized instruction, to foster collaborative learning, and to help build meaningful relationships among educators as well as among students. They also wanted the tool to be free and open source so that it could be adapted to their specific needs. In evaluating different tools, it was determined that there was no one tool that met all of their needs. The three programs Moodle, Google Apps, and Drupal all had parts of what was needed. It was decided to integrate the three and hence the name Moogpal.

Moodle has most of the learning management system features that were required. Also, it supports face-to-face instruction as well as virtual learning environments. It provides a secure environment because students must log into their account and can only access what is meant for them. Google Apps provides communication tools such as free email, messaging, and shared calendars. It enables collaboration by allowing students to create and share documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and sites. Drupal is a free software package that allows users to publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. It is very flexible and has many social modules that can be added.

Although each of the three programs Moodle, Google Apps, and Drupal can be used separately, there are several advantages to be gained by combining the tools. One advantage is that it provides for a single sign-on for students. Once they have logged on, students have the flexibility to use the best tools of each program. It provides a secure environment, or as the presenter said "a walled garden." The New Tech Network's Moogpal is a work in progress. The video presented a picture of what the final product might look like and how it would be used. It does not, however, give any technical information about how it is being done.

It was not clear to me whether the focus of this video was to encourage other school systems and educators to consider creating their own Moogpal or was simply a means of gaining some exposure for the New Tech Network. Although it looks like a Moogpal would be a great environment for schools to use, it would certainly take a lot more technical knowledge and time to create than most school systems would have. There was no suggestion that when the people at New Tech have completed their Moogpal it would be made available to other school systems. Even if they were willing to do so, it would probably need to be reconfigured and adapted to each school system individually.