Learn about what's been happening in our school library. We're working to strongly encourage literacy, media literacy, and creating upright digital citizens through fun workshops and library activities.
Copyright and Fair Use are tricky subjects for adults as much as for students. These issues can be quite complex and confusing. The point of today's workshop was to simplify it a little bit and help students to navigate these issues. As our students become more prolific creators of content with blogging, social media, and artworks (to name a few) they will need to understand what their rights are as a creator and what rights other creators have. They also need to understand in what specific situations using someone else's work is actually okay (believe it or not!) We opened by listening to a song, Pachelbel's Canon.
Our students of course thought it was the Maroon 5 song Memories. I explained that by the end of today's workshop, they would understand why Maroon 5 weren't going to be sued or have to pay royalties on stealing that song. This video created by Common Sense Media is a great tool for explaining some of these concepts in a simple way.
Students were then give a series of scenarios and had to decide if it was fair use of not. Fair Use is the ability to use copyrighted work without permission in certain ways and in specific situations. In teams, they decided if it was or wasn't and gave it a thumbs up or thumbs down and explained their group answers.
There is a pretty common misconception that you aren't allowed to use anyone else's photos or music for ANY purpose, but this workshop helped to define what is and isn't okay. When using songs and images for classroom-only purposes (like slideshows and presentations) it is actually fair use. If these were to be put online that's where you run into trouble as you would then be publishing them as your own and potentially making money from them. A good habits for students when using someone else's work for a project would be to cite it in a bibliography page. Other common examples of fair use are;
schoolwork/education (unpublished and/or not posted online)
criticism or commentary
news reporting
comedy/parody/memes
If something is public domain - over 70 years old
Though it is always helpful to encourage students to use their own photos, videos, and music for projects, this workshop helped students to understand the concept of fair use and the situations when it IS okay to use the work of other creators. And finally, in the case of Maroon 5, Pachelbel's Canon in D rests squarely in the public domain as it is approximately 339 years old.
Our two grade two classes got their first lesson about online footprints and how we leave them. They learned how to make sure that the footprints they are leaving online are the good kind!
I made sure to highlight a few other ways we can leave our footprints online that were not touched on in the video;
Comments left on websites (ex. youtube), video games, and blogs.
Our search history
Posting information that is intentionally not true
Posting embarrassing photos or videos of ourselves or others
We played a game where two characters - Ellie the Elephant and Mervin the Mouse left their online footprints all over the library. Students had to find these card footprints and decide which footprints were and were not the right kind to leave online. We all had lots of fun with this lesson!
The answer to a complex question like that isn't something Siri can answer so easily. The problem is that students are using this Siri driven searching method every time they go online. Typing long or complex questions into Google is a bad habit that needs to be broken in order to get the best search results for student research.
Grade 4 had a full period of practice on Thursday and it is already making a big difference in how they are approaching this task. We first talked about the importance of being specific with our search terms. Ari and Keira helped our grade 4s to get the idea with their tutorial.
Students were given a worksheet containing several long questions and asked to figure out what would be the most specific keywords to get the best results. It was important for me to continually remind them that they don't need to type a question in Google to get results.
Sample Questions: 1. My dog is digging holes in the backyard. Is that because they are looking for bones? Specific keywords to get a clear answer: dog digging 2. My friend just cheated at chess, what are the rules? Specific keywords to get a clear answer: chess rules or rules of chess
We then gave students a research question: Are video games addictive? Can they affect child behaviour? Students had to come up with all of the possible keywords and keyword combinations (called a query) on a whiteboard that would yield great search results for a paper on the topic.
Some of those were; video games and addiction children and video games child behaviour and video games video games and emotions children and addiction and video games etc.. etc...
Asking students to practice these skills with a daily in-class question is a great way to give them practice in this more precise way of searching. Through regular practice they will learn how to get meaningful results and this will improve the quality of their work overall.
