Copyright

Wow. It seems like copyright talk is all over town these days. Well at least for me it is. This topic is most important as a school librarian. Not only do I need to know about copyright-- I need to teach my students and help my staff understand it.

Having worked in a school for the past ten years, it is evident that teachers need more training on fair use and copyright. I think academic librarians should partner with the education departments in colleges to teach this as part of teacher training.

For the past few weeks, I have ironically been teaching my students about copyright. With my sixth graders, we learned about images and the use of Creative Commons. They are wrapping up their projects, so I am excited to see their learning in place. In fifth grade, this week we learned the parts of a book-- including copyright information to set us up for learning about citing sources MLA style.

I found that my students understood the topic better when using real life examples. I pulled up my brother-in-law as a photographer-- and discussed his rights as an artist. I found that aI really zoned in on the parts of the videos that connected to me. The section on fair use, or Creative Commons. I also liked the real world examples of the cases (although I wish we could have seen the slides with the images.)

It really connected me as a learner to what I need to do to tech issues that are tricky. I was reminded why collaboration is so important in school librarianship. Teaching information interact skills alone does not resonate with kids. My sixth grade students were much more engaged with the issues of copyright, because we were creating something where it applied to them. My fifth grade students were learning a skill in preparation for things to come.

**On another note, I found the blog post we read on the Internet and copyright interesting. In many ways I agree with the author. The web is a new way of sharing information. Personally, that is why I don't have issues with sites like Pinterest. I love when people link to my work. If people are concerned, they should watermark their images, or post a do not link. It is a touchy topic, and I am interested to see where it goes.

Does anyone know if when you subscribe to an RSS feed if the website is punted as viewed. I would love some more information on this.