Navigating Sharing Today

No discussion about digital citizenship can be complete without diving into copyright. I believe copyright discussions are more important today than ever as technology makes violating the creators rights too easy. Often times we as teachers or our students do even think about the fact that we are doing it.

A common occurrence probably happens almost every day in a classroom in the school. Teachers who do PowerPoints for their classes usually aren’t careful about the images they use or citing them even if they are in compliance. This modeling unintentionally leads to students having even less respect for copyright. Teachers should understand their rights under the fair use guidelines that allow the use of copy-protected work in certain instances (Office, n.d.).

Teachers also need to be aware of how the give assignments in relation to copyright. How often do we have rubrics which outline multiple categories yet do not have a category for copyright/citations. We need to make sure that we are educating and holding our students responsible as global citizens in today’s world.  This involves having conversations at the beginning of an assignment to address why copyright is important and how we can search for images based on their usage restrictions. Respecting others rights not only teaching good laws and ethics it also demonstrates the need to be thoughtful in all the things we do as citizens.

A good way to show students how to get content they are allowed to use involves teaching them how to use the usage tools built into a Google search. When you search images in Google, you can click Tools and then select from different Creative Commons licenses under Usage Rights. This allows students to use images that are licensed correctly.

Next, we need to have students creating and sharing their own original content. This will not only prepare them to succeed in college and beyond, it will also encourage them to appreciate the rights of authors. Making this personal to their work will hopefully help them empathize with the artist whose work they are consuming.

Once we have students create content we need to teach them about how to give others an appropriate license to use their material. A great platform to do this is through giving a Creative Commons license. Having students discuss and decide which of the six license types allows them to understand how to share their work but also leads to them understanding whether others are sharing their work. While we may never change the ever growing lack of respect for copyright in the digital age, hopefully by modeling and creating content we can raise students who respect the rights of others as good global citizens.

Other Resources

BYU Copyright 101

http://copyright101.byu.edu/tutorial/

Copyright Flowchart: Can I Use It? Yes? No? If This… Then… by Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano

http://langwitches.org/blog/2014/06/10/copyright-flowchart-can-i-use-it-yes-no-if-this-then/

That Image is Not Yours. Do Not Touch.

http://www.alicekeeler.com/2017/09/06/image-not-not-touch/

References

N.A. (n.d.). About the licenses. Retrieved September 24, 2017, from https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

Office, U. C. (n.d.). More information on fair use | U.S. copyright office. Retrieved September 24, 2017, from https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html