While reading this book, I found
myself a victim of all of the copyright “truths” teachers were told. I do not recall
when or where the misinformation came from, but I was afraid to cross that line
in fear that I would be fined or worse. I will admit, I would snip and clip a
photo or two if needed for instruction, but I never shared anything with
someone else’s pictures for fear that I would be caught.
I am thankful that Renee Hobbs
wrote this book. Although the guidelines for fair use and transformativeness
remain very judgmental, I now have an idea of how these two principles impact
me as a teacher. I am at ease now to use the resources available to me to
improve the quality of my instruction and I am eager to spread my knowledge
with other teachers to release them of the fears associated with copyright.
Since reading this book, I confidently made a PowerPoint use google searched photographs to teach a group of students about working in a business. We are working through our first Project Based Learning lesson on community helpers. I used the photographs to spark discussions about what people wear, what tools they use, and how do these people help us. Due to the lack of books or videos on this topic, the creation of the resource was vital in helping my students draw conclusions, gather information, and create questions before our expert came to visit our classroom.
Doesn't it feel good to understand fair use? I, too, feel confident using copyrighted material, now.
ReplyDeleteIt seems silly now to stress over using pictures, but we were trained to exercise this caution. I think that it is important to make these differences abundantly clear to students. I also think that it is still worth remembering that, just because we can use information or an image from the Internet does not mean that we always should.
ReplyDeleteIt's definitely going to take me a little while to get used to understanding these ideas because I've been so used to following strict guidelines with respect to copyright and almost being afraid to use something without breaking some sort of rule. It was nice to see how y'all used images in totally different ways to accompany your presentations. Having read the book, it should really spark some creativity for a lot of us and the people we work with.
ReplyDeleteI have also taken advantage of this new "freedom" we earned. I printed some pictures to use as visual resources for my ESOL kids, and I use a song to modify the lyrics and review word families. Both times I didn't have to second-guess myself, it saved me time, opened up my resources and made me confident about using them.
ReplyDelete