Digital Safety- Copyright and Fair Use

As teaching professionals, we utilize many different resources from various media. We teach by sharing information that we believe will be useful as supplemental material or a direct source of knowledge. Most of the time we do not take into consideration that much of the information out there is another individuals personal creation and may be subject to copyright law. What is copyright? Based on the definition by Dictionary.com copyright is "the exclusive right to produce copies and to control an original literary, musical, or artistic work, granted by law for a specified number of years (in Britain, usually 70 years from the death of the author, composer, etc, or from the date of publication if later)." This right protects the authors and their personal works from others making a profit off of their ideas or claiming credentials for something they, themselves, did not create. In the education field, copyright makes it somewhat difficult for teachers to distinguish what can or cannot be shared. They information shared in the classroom should not be for profit and is not intended to be publicized for popularity or fame. Because of this, educators should familiarize themselves with the practices of Fair Use. In the Fair Use Doctrine, there are exceptions to the law that allow individuals, such as teachers, a little leeway to share material for educational purposes, without fear of copyright infringement. As I worked with my group on our presentation , we joked about how much information in our presentation could have been copyrighted, without the use of proper citations. We used some graphics from the internet and information from various sources, all of which was cited in our references page. We did have some challenges trying to meet in person, but we were able to communicate using tools such as Skype and Wiggio. This project was very useful, not only for our personal information, but for our fellow teacher/ students as well. We provided them with more resources that they could access from our webpage that would help them in their classrooms. If I were to change anything about this lesson it would be to have more time studying digital safety in general. In this tech-world that we live in today, we can not have enough education about internet safety. Not only for ourselves, but for us to arm our students with this nknowledge, as well. Resources: www.dictionary.com http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org ncte.org/positions/statements/fairusemedialiteracy