Fair Use & Copyrights

• What is your responsibility as a teaher to understand and use images with copyright, public domain, and creative commons licenses?
• What are our responsibilities to use (and teach students) to select images, text, video, and audio with proper citations?
• What are the ethical issues around music and movie downloading? How can this be addressed with your students?

Teachers use outside resources and ideas daily that are not their own. Teachers use images, videos, game ideas, lesson plans, worksheets, etc. almost everyday and a lot of the time, they get them from another teacher or online. It is a teachers responsibility to make sure that the content or information they use are correctly cited and sourced. There are endless amounts of sources available to teachers and educators to make sure everything is cited the way it is supposed to be. As a student myself, I have used Purdue Owl, and that is what my past and present teachers have also told me to use. I have been using that since early high school and even use it today as a college student. Because we are teaching students, it is so important that we show and model to them how to correctly cite sources when using images and media with copyrights, public domains, and creative commons licenses. After watching videos about creative commons and copyrights, I saw how daily we use other people's work and saw how they should get credit for all of the hard work they put into it.  

Downloading music and movies illegally is stealing another person's handwork and dedication. It is so ethically wrong, but so many people do it every single day. People work so hard to create movies and music and it is not fair how easy it is to illegally download it. If I worked months or even years on something and someone stole it from me, I would be pretty upset to say the least. I could address this to my students in so many ways. I could have them work on a project for a month and then at the end just take it from them and tell them that I'm taking full credit for it, so they could see first hand how wrong it is and how it feels. Also, we need to educate our students about what could happen if they get caught downloading music/movies for free. As a college student, the consequences of getting caught is enough for me to not do it. http://it.umd.edu/PlayFair/igotcaught.html

Because we are so advanced in technology and only getting more advanced, it is important to teach our students how to give credit while using others images, content, ideas, music, movies, etc.