It's been awhile!

I realized that once my class discussion about copyright was over, I quit writing on my blog! I miss is but I may have to change the title! My latest summer class is Young Adult Literature. Very fun!

But I want pictures!

After reading chapter 4 in our text I agree with Rebecca's "C is for Copy" post in her blog "ABCs and 123s of Copyright". I really like pictures, but I believe I've been doing it wrong, gasp, even illegally. I love to find poems for my small groups of 1st-3rd readers. They need fluency practice so we do weekly poems. To make them more interesting and pretty, I copy color photos that go with the poem. Sigh. I believe after having become "educated" in copyright laws, I need to either gain permission, use my own pictures, or give it up. Boo! The students love them! I think what I need are some sites where I have the clip art "owner"'s permission to use the clip art. I'm not selling it, I'm not using it to publish, but I am copying it and giving it to 3-6 students. Okay! I'm afraid I'm guilty of the right clicking mouse! For this post the picture I added is my own...my husband and kids scuba diving. That will work for one lesson, but I sure didn't have a picture of a sled dog this week! Any good websites out there that allow copying?

Citing Sources

I'm sweating about choosing information from my sources for my research paper for my 504 class. I want to make sure I do it correctly and yet don't have a paper full of listed sources and quotation marks. So, I have to come up with my own words. That's the hard part for me since we got into this copyright issue. If I don't quote word for word, if I use my own ideas and words and then give a source that the idea came from, I should be okay. But somewhere in there is a grey area about my ideas. At what point are my ideas purely my own and not a combination of what I have read of someone else's ideas? I think for my own purposes, I get the difference. But how do you teach that to students?

Teaching our students...

I was thinking that there are excellent reasons to teach our students about copyright laws. I'm sure most students have heard about copyright because of copying music. And, I know that most teachers discuss plargairism on papers. But, have we taught them the skill of writing a paper with their own ideas so they're not plagarizing? I had a student take the DRA assessment and copy, word for word, their summary. I'm thinking that there was a child that needed to be taught "HOW". It's not an easy thing. I think we need to give students more time in learning what to quote, what to say in their own words, and how to do both. That could be so many lessons! I realize part of the problem is squeezing that into the curriculum. However, I think it's an important idea to squeeze in!

Not so boring!

I'm really enjoying reading all the different blogs and comments to my blog, about copyright. Who knew there is so much information about it!? I still find it a bit intimidating to think I could inadvertently infringe on someones copyright. Aren't there laws out there to help the "honest infringer"?

Ah, an answer

I've just found out that the teacher I worked with couldn't have legally copyrighted the worksheets he did. In our text, Copyright for Schools: A Practical Guide, the author states that if a teacher is doing worksheets for a grade they are teaching, those worksheets are the property of the school district they work for, even if they are done at home! (p. 23) Amazing! It doesn't sound quite fair! I did copy a picture off google images, to the right. If I added: www.thefeltsource.com Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright, would that be enough? If you want to do things legally, how much do you need to notate? How much permission do you need?

More Findings

I've begun reading my class text, Copyright for Schools a Practical Guide by Carol Simpson. Already I'm finding out new things! I thought copyright was something new. Not so, says the author. She says that George Washington signed the first copyright law in 1798. Interesting! Now, something in my reading made me ask tsome questions. Who regulates copyrights? What organization or people actually locate all of the abusers?