Copyright

As an educator, the issue of copyright has been addressed at my school in a little bit. We have posters above each of our photocopy machines. I  personally find these posters to have an impact. As I get ready to photocopy different materials I constantly find myself looking at this poster, its check boxes and making mental checks to see that I, myself am not doing anything illegal. Additionally. presentations that are given at staff meetings, usually have citations on the slides for members to see.  However, in all honesty, I don't think the issue of copyright is something that is addressed/enforced at my school very much. Yes- we discuss plagiarism, quotations, paraphrasing and citations as educators (click here if you would like to see the MLA ppt I show to my Grade 11 English Class) but I think the overall topic is something that my school expects people to know and therefore, it isn't something that is discussed. 

 As teacher, I tell my students that the simple copy and paste from Google Images into their presentations isn't enough- sometimes you are taking images that individuals/corporations have copyrighted and don't want them to be re-used. I show them how to filter their search so that they may find images that are okay for them use so long as they aren't making money off of them! 

Confession Time: 

I have found myself making excuses to cross the line. For example, showing movies in class. In 2015-2016 I used my own Netflix account to show all sorts of things, depending on what I was teaching. In the 2016-2017 school year when I was gearing up to show some of the same movies, I found myself hitting a roadblock- NO Netflix, NO DVD drive attached to my computer and NO full movie found on YouTube :( . I'll confess, I was a unaware that Netflix had been blocked and found myself in a jam as I was hoping to show the film. So, I sent out an email to the staff and got a reply from someone who had it on their computer, I copied it on to my USB (no questions asked) and showed the film the next day. I'm aware that my actions are illegal but more importantly, that I have been teaching my students it's okay to do this when I'm asking them to be conscious of the materials they are taking and reusing. We have since purchased the external DVD drives that can be plugged into computers. This allowed for me to give a list to my Department Head of movies which needed to be purchased. But if I've done it, I'm sure others have too and I encourage all of us to think about it before we do because students' learn from examples, we should be modelling the right type of behavior when it comes to copyright.


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