"Awareness of copyright is important because [we] are educating the copyright owners and users of tomorrow" As teachers, we use many resources to educate our students. These can include textbooks, music, video, artwork and much more. In many cases, these materials may be protected by copyright. This document outlines the rights and obligations of educators as they relate to copyright issues that will occur in public schools.
Key Highlights:
Individuals that work in public, non-profit education may use copyright-protected media for "research, private study, criticism, review, news reporting, education, satire, and parody". Any usage of these materials should be accompanied by the appropriate reference.
Live and recorded music are not allowed to be played without permission/payment during: school dances, sporting events or as P.A. or background music. This requires a SOCAN or Re:Sound licence.
Teachers may use video on school premises from a DVD (rented or owned) and may show videos from YouTube. Teachers may not use subscription services to stream video as they typically have restrictions to "personal" or "household" use (eg. Netflix). Teachers may not copy media at home and show it in the classroom.
Student work is protected by their own copyright (via parents, if student is a minor). Teachers, the work they produce, is copyrighted by their employer (school board).
This paper discusses the significant impact of digital technology in teacher education, and the necessity of having teacher educators model effective strategies for integration of digital technology. The author describes an initiative started in the California education system, called The Digital Flexbook, "The term flexbook refers to the free, nonlinear, highly customizable and easy-to-use nature of open source textbooks (Fletcher, 2010)." Benefits such as collaboration among school districts, interactive classrooms, and increased teacher creativity were observed. Barriers such as lack of funds, lack of student access to technology at home, and lack of PD for teachers were also observed.
Further benefits such as the ability to accurately reflect a community, the presence of a collaborative space to construct knowledge in innovative ways, showing multiple perspectives, promoting higher order thinking, and democratising knowledge.
The author lists Web2.0 tools such as "...video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites like Twitter (Richardson, 2006a), all of which move students from consumers of information to editors of information.
Research and experience show the need to infuse the TPCK model into teacher education, thus allowing students to become generators of knowledge and contributors to the Internet. One more big benefit of such constructivist pedagogy is allows for teachers and students to become more critical of the … intersection of race, gender, and
socio-economic status on the writing of history, and integrated a model for how technology can and should be used in the classroom.