Copyright and Doing it Right

Copyright and Doing It Right

My responsibility as a teacher when it comes to understanding and using images with copyright, public domain, and creative common licenses is not only teaching my students how to correctly do these things, but me as well. If I am choosing to use others work to help teach my students, all three of these things are very important to be aware of. Even if content I found on the internet was completely share-able with no copyright shown, I would cite these sources to make sure I give credit to the creator. As the videos and articles said, attributions MUST be made. I want to respect my fellow educators from all around the globe and want them to know that I would like to use their work because of the effectiveness it would have when teaching my class. I would appreciate the same thing done to me if a teacher wanted to use a sample of my work. I love the set up of creative common licenses. I had never heard of this before and this is a great way for creators to have their work known so that people can keep coming back to them to explore more work.

I believe it is absolutely ESSENTIAL to teach our students about proper citations when they use someones work. When we teach them the responsibility early, this will get the importance of citation imprinted in their mind. A site I used when I was in middle school in high school to use proper citations was easybib.com It has free bibliography templates you can use and will show you the proper way to site your sources and you can copy and paste it into whatever format of work you are using. Here is the link: http://www.easybib.com/
This site saved my life years ago and I would recommend it to my students in a heart beat.

When it comes to the ethical issues around music and movie downloading, you must be very careful. This has been a very controversial issue in the past decade. Their have been many many lawsuits happen over this. You MUST make sure this music or movies can be shared. If you do not have permission, it is illegal to download. The music and movies are the work of artists who deserve every bit of credit for their creation. I couldn't stress enough the importance of getting permission from the artist to download their work and making sure they are completely credited. With the access to about anything on the internet, it is so easy to download music and movies. I used to do it in high school and looking back on it, I regret it. Do you remember when LimeWire was thing? Goodness, that was addicting wasn't it? Millions of people were using this and an insane amount of music and movies has been stolen.
As for addressing this issue with my students, I would give them the information of the all the lawsuits and trouble they could get themselves in when they do no have permission from the artist to have their work. Students NEED to understand the importance of this.

Here is a link to cool article about the ethics of music and movie copying and downloading: https://theosophical.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/the-ethics-of-musicmovie-copying-downloading/

Hope this helps you guys out! Thanks for reading!

-Mark