Copy your Rights

In any class we ever had to write any essay for we were always told to cite our sources and no plagiarizing or we could fail.  How often are we told how to actually cite a source or actually taught about copyrights of images or texts?  For me I always only had one class per-year that talked about internet safety, but copyrights were never a topic that really came up in my schools.  

As a teacher we have the responsibility to show and be examples of what copyrights are and how we use them. Teachers have the role to play as not only a teacher of their area content but also much more about becoming an adult. 

In each lesson, we as teachers, try to be creative and use different ways to interest our students. In each slid, poster, creation that we use pictures/images in we need to be able to be a good role model and use proper citation of it. We must know the different kinds of legal actions to take in using an image of someone else's. Teachers have to know the difference between complete copyrights, public domain and creative common license. We have to understand when we can use certain things and what course of action we must take in regards to each category. Every image that you use will more than likely fall into one of these categories, use the the Copyright questions and resources on this website to help determine what course of action to take to ensure that you have all the copyrights to use the image. As a teacher you must follow all the rules and regulations of each of the categories of copyrights. 

It is our job to ensure that the next generations are using citations properly to ensure that they are properly using outside sources. It is our responsibility to teach and show our students what a good citation looks like and how to do it correctly. We must also follow good citations in our teachings to ensure a good role model for the kids. Since determining if the outside content is copyrighted takes a good amount of time to do, we must make sure that our students do it properly and also make sure we are doing the same. We must know how to cite each different kind of source, and how to get copyright rights to each kind of source as well. Teachers can use this simple guideline to check what they are doing, and make sure they are using the proper ways to go about copyrights of different kinds. Many of our students will want to just pull outside stuff off the web from various websites, but we must make sure that they are looking for the copyrights. Many things on the web are for the public, but we should always try and push our students to check and get permission just in case. By checking each source for copyrights, is a good habit to get the students into at such an early age. 

Music and movies are such a big part of today's society. We are constantly listening to music and showing movies in classrooms today. It is hard to tell students, no, they cannot use what they find the internet to do a project or homework when it is so easy and accessible to them. But here lies a problem because kids can use parts of things, but then they end up losing the ability to be creative and wanting to be creative as well. Also the amount in which students use in downloads is also illegal on almost all purposes in which our students use these downloads. This becomes an even bigger issue that then teachers need to address in a way that should help the kids even get away from using them so much. More education about downloads and the issues with illegal content. By making kids more aware of the legal issues and copyright issues we could help students be more understanding of it all.