I found out today that this is Copyright Awareness Week. In recognition of this occasion NCTE Inbox [subscribe to NCTE Inbox] newsletter had several links to resources about finding and using online media and information. For teachers whose students use the internet for project work, this seemed like a valuable resource. I’ve collected them in my del.icio.us/noon/copyright folder. I’ve included annotations so that anyone browsing the tag might be able to see which links might be useful for students.
Students need to learn how to acknowledge the sources they use, and they also need to learn when to do so. My students have innocently turned in web pages that they’ve simply printed, thinking that qualifies as a report. At age 10, I imagine they feel pretty smart giving me a bunch of reading to do! My fourth-graders are learning to take notes with TextEdit, Apple’s native text editing application, by copying-to/pasting-from the computer clipboard and then digging out the stuff they understand, rewriting it so it makes sense and comes out sounding like something they understand. Citing the source material is pretty far out for most of them at this point.
I’m satisfied when students can find information and restate what they understood without copying the source material verbatim. With a computer, this involves managing multiple windows and applications. It’s good to see some of them doing it almost naturally now. At the beginning of the year, none of them knew about copy/paste, or cycling between applications. Now they use it routinely to accomplish basic tasks.
Following some of the copyright links took me to the ReadWriteThink.org lessons pages maintained by IRA, NCTE, and the Marco Polo Education Foundation. This is one of the most comprehensive literacy resources I know of. It’s been a while since I’ve browsed the site and I’m going to make a point of looking around there again real soon. I especially like the lesson plan selector that lets you search for grade level options, literacy strand options, and lesson content (”engagement”) options.
The literacy strand options allow for searching among three process objectives: Learning language-using language to make meaning, Learning about language-comprehension strategies and word study, and Learning through language-using reading and writing as a tool for exploration and critique. It’s an excellent conceptual model for a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction.
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[...] Doug’s recent post, Resources for Copyright Literacy, was very timely. How to effectively teach kids about the issues of intellectual property and the concept of copyright has been hampered by my practical ignorance in this area. I’ve always known that copying slabs of other people’s written content was both morally and legally wrong but in the past, I always figured that unless the words “copyright”, “all rights reserved” or © appeared, then that work was fair game to be used however one pleased. I actually thought to be protected by copyright, that it had to be stated up front or you had no rights at all. So, after checking out Doug’ del.icio.us links, I now have a great set of resources to use with my students. I also received a complimentary copy of The Education Technology Guide at last week’s Marc Prensky’s seminar. It contained an article by Gibb Owen, a Sydney based solicitor titled What is “Intellectual Property” and “Industrial Property”? This helped to make things really clear to me including a pretty good definition of “fair use”. In the spirit of fair use (ie. I’m reviewing his article), some segments are worth quoting. [...]
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